I found a script to downgrade abiword-2.9.2  to  abiword-2.8.6 at this link:  

http://xubuntugeek.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-to-downgrade-abiword-version-to-286.html

It worked quite flawlessly for me on lxle 12.04.5.

I brought up a terminal, made it
root (sudo su), copy & pasted the terminal command line from the
high-lighted box at the link to the terminal, and hit return.

Notes:

1.  Synaptic Package Manager must be closed for the downgrade script to run successfully.

2.  The downgrade script seems
to expect abiword-2.9.2 to be installed prior to running the script, so I
suggest checking with Synaptic Package Manager first.  It seems to need
abiword-common, abiword-2.92, abiword-plugin-grammar, and
abiword-plugin-mathview packages to all be installed via Synaptic, if
not already there.  For installation, they seem to need to be
Marked-For-Installation in that order.

3. The initial abiword screen
display contained artifacts of a 2nd ruler.  Maximizing the window,
quitting abiword, and restarting abiword seemed to take care of that
problem.

4.  If you run into dependency issues with the script, try using Synaptic to remove broken packages.

5.  The spell checker works.