Python: check whether a word is spelled correctly

Question

I'm looking for a an easy way to check whether a certain string is a correctly-spelled English word. For example, 'looked' would return True while 'hurrr' would return False. I don't need spelling suggestions or any spelling-correcting features. Just a simple function that takes a string and returns a boolean value.

Hunspell check is very famous, Try its python wrapper. https://datascience.blog.wzb.eu/2016/07/13/autocorrecting-misspelled-words-in-python-using-hunspell/ — Dev_Man, Oct 14 '18 at 14:06

score 31 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 28 '18 at 11:44

31

Two possible ways of doing it:

Have your own file which has all the valid words. Load the file into a set and compare each word to see whether it exists in it (word in set)
(The better way) Use PyEnchant, a spell checking library for Python

PyEnchant is not actively maintained now.

edited Mar 28 '18 at 11:44

xtreak

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answered Dec 21 '10 at 15:30

user225312

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Thank you, this is exactly what I did while waiting for an answer ;) – Nikolai Dec 21 '10 at 15:34
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Use a set rather than a list, and ask `if word in my_set` for better performance. – Karl Knechtel Dec 21 '10 at 15:55
@Karl: A very valid point indeed, sets are significantly faster than lists when it comes to determining if an object is present in the set or not. Updated. – user225312 Dec 21 '10 at 16:17
PyEnchant is an excellent suggestion! – moi Dec 01 '13 at 12:14
Instead of list or set, I'll go for [trie tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie) – venkatvb Jun 30 '15 at 12:03

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 07 '17 at 22:42

I was looking for the same functionality and struggled to find an existing library that works in Windows, 64 bit. PyEnchant, although a great library, isn't currently active and doesn't work in 64 bit. Other libraries I found didn't work in Windows.

I finally found a solution that I hope others will find valuable.

The solution...

Use nltk
Extract the word list from nltk.corpus.brown
Convert the word list to a set (for efficient searching)
Use the in keyword to determine if your string is in the set

from nltk.corpus import brown
word_list = brown.words()
word_set = set(word_list)

# Check if word is in set
"looked" in word_set  # Returns True
"hurrr" in word_set  # Returns False

Use a timer check and you'll see this takes virtually no time to search the set. A test on 1,000 words took 0.004 seconds.

Missing a lot of not terribly uncommon words, e.g. reuse, gleams, cue etc. — Tahlor, Mar 29 '18 at 03:27

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 30 '18 at 17:17

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I personally used: http://textblob.readthedocs.io/en/dev/ It is an active project and according to the website:

Spelling correction is based on Peter Norvig’s “How to Write a Spelling Corrector”[1] as implemented in the pattern library. It is about 70% accurate

answered Jan 30 '18 at 17:17

krinker

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Textblob is super cool! in installation, usage, documentation. Thanks for sharing – Nov 06 '19 at 16:01

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 06 '12 at 13:20

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Yahoo provides spell checking API through YQL.

Its pretty simple and you get 5000 queries/ip address/day for non-commercial use (FREE)

answered Sep 06 '12 at 13:20

Surya

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Python: check whether a word is spelled correctly

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