I need to highlight a list of words in vim, preferably the words should be defined in a file. A bit like spell checking. I have been looking at http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Highlight_multiple_words but it requires that I define each word as a new position and does not support storing the words to a file (though they are storable).
You could use the :match command.
:match Todo /word1/
The first parameter of the command is the highlight-group (to see all available groups :highlight). The second parameter is a search pattern.
You can put these in any file and load it via :source.
Another way is to change the regular expression (thx @zpon):
:match Todo /word1\|word2\|word3/
If you want to highlight them differently:
:match Todo /word1/
:2match Error /word2/
:3match Title /word3/