Editing Spell checker (section)

==History==
===Pre-PC===
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.<ref>{{cite web|last=Earnest|first=Les|title=The First Three Spelling Checkers|url=http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/spelling.pdf|publisher=Stanford University|access-date=10 October 2011|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121022091418/http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/spelling.pdf|archive-date=22 October 2012}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite book
|last=Peterson |first=James |title=Computer Programs for Detecting and Correcting Spelling Errors
|date=December 1980 |url= http://simson.net/ref/2006/csci_e-180/ref/spelling-p676-peterson.pdf
|access-date=2011-02-18}}</ref>  Gorin wrote SPELL in [[assembly language]], for faster action; he made the first spelling corrector by searching the word list for plausible correct spellings that differ by a single letter or adjacent letter transpositions and presenting them to the user.  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.<ref>{{cite book
    |last=Earnest |first=Les
    |title=Visible Legacies for Y3K
    |url=https://stanford.edu/~learnest/legacies.pdf
    |access-date=2011-02-18 |url-status=dead
    |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110720044806/http://stanford.edu/~learnest/legacies.pdf
    |archive-date=2011-07-20}}</ref>  SPELL, its algorithms and data structures inspired the Unix ''ispell'' program.
  
The first spell checkers were widely available on mainframe computers in the late 1970s.  A group of six linguists from [[Georgetown University]] developed the first spell-check system for the IBM corporation.<ref name="cled.georgetown.edu">{{cite web
|url=http://cled.georgetown.edu/faculty
|title=Georgetown U Faculty & Staff: The Center for Language, Education & Development
|access-date=2008-12-18
|url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090205140452/http://cled.georgetown.edu/faculty
|archive-date=2009-02-05}}, citation: "Maria Mariani... was one of a group of six linguists from Georgetown University who developed the first spell-check system for the IBM corporation."</ref>

[[Henry Kučera]] invented one for the VAX machines of Digital Equipment Corp in 1981.<ref>{{Cite news
|title=Teaching Computers to Spell (obituary for Henry Kučera)
|last=Harvey |first=Charlotte Bruce |date=May–June 2010
|work=Brown Alumni Magazine |page=79|url=https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/2010-05-13/teaching-computers-to-spell}}</ref>

===Unix===

The [[Ispell|International Ispell]] program commonly used in Unix is based on R. E. Gorin's SPELL. It was converted to C by Pace Willisson at MIT.<ref>{{Cite web |title=International Ispell |url=https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/ispell.html |access-date=2023-02-19 |website=www.cs.hmc.edu}}</ref>

The GNU project has its spell checker [[GNU Aspell]]. Aspell's main improvement is that it can more accurately suggest correct alternatives for misspelled English words.<ref>{{Cite web |title=GNU Aspell |url=http://aspell.net/ |access-date=2023-02-19 |website=aspell.net}}</ref>

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 language]]s and complex compound words. Hunspell also uses Unicode in its dictionaries.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Hunspell: About |url=https://hunspell.github.io/ |access-date=2023-02-19 |website=hunspell.github.io}}</ref>
Hunspell replaced the previous [[MySpell]] in [[OpenOffice.org]] in version 2.0.2.

[[Enchant (software)|Enchant]] is another general spell checker, derived from [[AbiWord]]. 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.<ref>{{Citation |title=AbiWord/enchant |date=2023-02-13 |url=https://github.com/AbiWord/enchant |publisher=AbiWord |access-date=2023-02-19}}</ref>

===PCs===
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.<ref>{{cite news
   |url=https://www.commodore.ca/gallery/magazines/compute/Compute-008.pdf
   |title=Micro Computer Industries, Ltd.  |work=Compute! Magazine, Issue 8, Vol. 3, No. 1
   |date=January 1981  |author=Advertisement |page=119}}</ref> Developers such as Maria Mariani<ref name="cled.georgetown.edu"/> and [[Random House]]<ref name="pc198211">{{cite magazine |magazine=[[PC Magazine]]
|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vy3cBZkjbZgC&pg=PA165
|title=The Spelling Bee Is Over
|date=November 1982 |access-date=21 October 2013 |author=Advertisement |pages=165}}</ref> rushed [[Original equipment manufacturer|OEM]] packages or end-user products into the rapidly expanding software market. On the pre-Windows PCs, these spell checkers were standalone programs, many of which could be run in [[terminate-and-stay-resident]] mode from within word-processing packages on PCs with sufficient memory.

However, the market for standalone packages was short-lived, as by the mid-1980s developers of popular word-processing packages like [[WordStar]] and [[WordPerfect]] had incorporated spell checkers in their packages, mostly licensed from the above companies, who quickly expanded support from just [[English language|English]] to many [[Languages of Europe|Europe]]an and eventually even [[Asian language]]s. However, this required increasing sophistication in the morphology routines of the software, particularly with regard to heavily-[[agglutinative]] languages like [[Hungarian language|Hungarian]] and [[Finnish language|Finnish]]. Although the size of the word-processing market in a country like [[Iceland]] might not have justified the investment of implementing a spell checker, companies like WordPerfect nonetheless strove to localize their software for as many national markets as possible as part of their global [[marketing]] strategy.

When Apple developed "a system-wide spelling checker" for Mac OS X so that "the operating system took over spelling fixes,"<ref>{{cite book
|title=Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual |author=David Pogue |year=2009}}</ref> it was a first: one "didn't have to maintain a separate spelling checker for each" program.<ref>{{cite book |title=Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual
|author=David Pogue |year=2015|publisher="O'Reilly Media, Inc." |isbn=9781491948125 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1XFmBgAAQBAJ}}</ref> [[Mac OS X]]'s spellcheck coverage includes virtually all bundled and third party applications.

''Visual Tools''' ''VT Speller'', introduced in 1994, was "designed for developers of applications that support Windows."<ref>{{cite news |newspaper=[[Computerworld]]
   |date=February 21, 1994  |page=68
   |title=VisualTools VT-Speller}}</ref><ref>{{cite web
|url=https://trademarks.justia.com/browse-by-date/1993/september/27
|title=Browse September 27, 1993
|quote=VT-SPELLER}}</ref> It came with a dictionary but had the ability to build and incorporate use of secondary dictionaries.<ref>{{cite magazine  |magazine=[[PC Magazine]] |date=November 8, 1994
   |title=Spell-Checking for your Apps
   |author=Peter G. Aitken |page=299}}</ref>

===Browsers===
Web browsers such as [[Firefox]] and [[Google Chrome]] offer spell checking support, using [[Hunspell]]. Prior to using Hunspell, Firefox and Chrome used [[MySpell]] and [[GNU Aspell]], respectively.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://battlepenguin.com/tech/aspell-and-hunspell-a-tale-of-two-spell-checkers/|title=Aspell and Hunspell: A Tale of Two Spell Checkers|website=battlepenguin.com}}</ref>

===Specialties===
Some spell checkers have separate support for medical dictionaries to help prevent medical errors.<ref>{{cite web |year=2017 |url=https://e-medtools.com/openmedspel.html |title=Medical Spell Checker for Firefox and Thunderbird |publisher=e-MedTools |access-date=2018-08-29 |archive-date=2019-05-04 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190504223323/https://e-medtools.com/openmedspel.html |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Quathamer |first1=Dr. Tobias |year=2016 |url=https://github.com/toddy15/medicalterms |title=German medical dictionary words |publisher=Dr. Tobias Quathamer |access-date=2018-08-29}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Friedman |first1=Richard A. |last2=D |first2=M |year=2003 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/health/cases-do-spelling-and-penmanship-count-in-medicine-you-bet.html |title=CASES; Do Spelling and Penmanship Count? In Medicine, You Bet |work=The New York Times |access-date=2018-08-29}}</ref>