It used to be included with the OpenOffice.org office suite and Mozilla client software, and was replaced with the more powerful Hunspell library between 2006 and 2008.
MySpell was started by Kevin Hendricks in an attempt to integrate various open-source spelling checkers into the OpenOffice.org build.
With a little prodding from Kevin Atkinson, the author of Pspell and Aspell, a new spelling checker (MySpell) was written in C++ that supported affix compression, based on Ispell.
[citation needed] Every locale (language for a specific territory) can have files for spelling, hyphenation and a thesaurus.
Dictionary.lst can be edited with a simple text editor, but front ends provide a more user-friendly way of adding new locales.