Spell checker

Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

[1] An alternative type of spell checker uses solely statistical information, such as n-grams, to recognize errors instead of correctly-spelled words.

[4] In 1961, Les Earnest, who headed the research on this budding technology, saw it necessary to include the first spell checker that accessed a list of 10,000 acceptable words.

[5] Ralph Gorin, a graduate student under Earnest at the time, created the first true spelling checker program written as an applications program (rather than research) for general English text: SPELL for the DEC PDP-10 at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in February 1971.

Gorin made SPELL publicly accessible, as was done with most SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) programs, and it soon spread around the world via the new ARPAnet, about ten years before personal computers came into general use.

A group of six linguists from Georgetown University developed the first spell-check system for the IBM corporation.

Aspell's main improvement is that it can more accurately suggest correct alternatives for misspelled English words.

[11] Due to the inability of traditional spell checkers to check words in complex inflected languages, Hungarian László Németh developed Hunspell, a spell checker that supports agglutinative languages and complex compound words.

Its goal is to combine programs supporting different languages such as Aspell, Hunspell, Nuspell, Hspell (Hebrew), Voikko (Finnish), Zemberek (Turkish) and AppleSpell under one interface.

[13] The first spell checkers for personal computers appeared in 1980, such as "WordCheck" for Commodore systems which was released in late 1980 in time for advertisements to go to print in January 1981.

[14] Developers such as Maria Mariani[8] and Random House[15] rushed OEM packages or end-user products into the rapidly expanding software market.

However, this required increasing sophistication in the morphology routines of the software, particularly with regard to heavily-agglutinative languages like Hungarian and Finnish.

Visual Tools' VT Speller, introduced in 1994, was "designed for developers of applications that support Windows.

[20] Web browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome offer spell checking support, using Hunspell.

Context-sensitive spell checkers appeared in the now-defunct applications Microsoft Office 2007[27] and Google Wave.