In computing, a spell checker is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.
Welcome to CWAnswers
CWAnswers is your guide to the sprawling world wide web. The directory aims to provide a useful guide made by users. You can share your knowledge as well - simply sign up and edit your first entry. For questions just contact the team at support - at - cwanswers.com.
Weblinks for Spell Check
Top 10 for Spell Check
Things about Spell Check you find nowhere else.
Select content modules
In computing, a spell checker is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.
It came with my Pea Sea.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss Steaks I can knot sea.
Eye strike the quays and type a whirred
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am write oar wrong
It tells me straight a weigh.
Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your shore real glad two no.
Its vary polished in its weigh.
My chequer tolled me sew.
A chequer is a bless thing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right all stiles of righting,
And aides me when eye rime.
Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed too bee a joule.
The chequer pours o'er every word
Two cheque sum spelling rule.
An unsophisticated spell checker will find little or no fault with this poem because it checks words in isolation. A more sophisticated spell checker will make use of a language model to consider the context in which a word occurs.
Operation
Simple spell checkers operate on individual words by comparing each of them against the contents of a dictionary, possibly performing stemming on the word. If the word is not found it is considered to be an error, and an attempt may be made to suggest a word that was likely to have been intended. One such suggestion algorithm is to list those words in the dictionary having a small Levenshtein distance from the original word.
When a word which is not within the dictionary is encountered most spell checkers provide an option to add that word to a list of known exceptions that should not be flagged.
Design
A spell checker customarily consists of two parts:
- A set of routines for scanning text and extracting words, and
- An algorithm for comparing the extracted words against a known list of correctly spelled words (ie., the dictionary).
The scanning routines sometimes include language-dependent algorithms for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, word extraction routines will need to handle such phenomena as contractions and possessives. It is unclear whether morphological analysis provides a significant benefit. 1
The word list might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes.
