Javascript Spell Checking Methods

Question

Hey, I'm making a Web Based anagram game for fun and practice. The game presents the player with a word and the player needs only to construct new words out of letters contained in the given word. Where I am running into trouble is spellchecking the submitted words for validation purposes.

I initially thought that this would be fairly trivial, and my first solution was to just copy the dictionary file that is located at usr/share/dict and compare the submitted answers to the words in that file. This however fails when dealing with different forms of a word. For instance, the dictionary has the word "ask", but if the user were to enter the word "asks", it would be considered wrong.

Knowing that I can't hope to write a functional spellchecking algorithm (nor do I want to spend the time trying to tackle that) I thought that I may be able to use the browsers built in spell checking capabilities. But my searching for an answer to this hasn't produced any useful results.

Is there a way to use the browsers spellchecking capabilities, perhaps using javascript or something? And if not, how might I best approach this problem?

Thanks!

there are premade libraries that can do this for your, i will post the link as soon as i find it — Ibu, May 29 '11 at 06:05

score 8 · Answer 1 · answered May 29 '11 at 15:22

John Resig (of jQuery fame) recently wrote a series of blog posts about fast spell checking for a Javascript-based anagram game he's working on.

http://ejohn.org/blog/dictionary-lookups-in-javascript/
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-trie-performance-analysis/
http://ejohn.org/blog/revised-javascript-dictionary-search/

You might be able to skip to the last one where he wraps up all his findings there. It is quite in depth, measuring up look-up speed, download time, initialization time..

+1 Tks a ton for the links. They have a ton of info on the very subject i was looking for. — techfoobar, Sep 12 '12 at 15:11

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered May 29 '11 at 07:05

4

JavaScript spell-checking libraries do exist. I ran across this a little while ago: http://www.chrisfinke.com/2011/03/31/announcing-typo-js-client-side-javascript-spellchecking/

answered May 29 '11 at 07:05

Eevee

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I've just checked it. it's meant to be used for Chrome extensions. It's un-usable for anything else. – vsync Jan 13 '14 at 20:14
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@vsync the second paragraph says: "there's no reason it wouldn't work in other JavaScript environments" – Eevee Jan 14 '14 at 02:35
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I tried it just yesterday on my FF, and it flipped on me with an exception about "CHROME" something. then I read on the project's page in Github: "Typo.js is a JavaScript spellchecker that uses Hunspell-style dictionaries. Its main use is to allow Chrome extensions to perform client-side spellchecking." – vsync Jan 14 '14 at 09:32
typojs is extremely slow. If you hand it gibberish long words it can't handle it. – Arash Saidi Mar 29 '16 at 21:45

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited May 29 '11 at 21:53

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There are plenty of free dictionaries online that include plurals, hyphenations etc.

E.g. a quick Google search found these dictionaries which support the spell checking functions of OpenOffice.

Have a Google. You can always aggregate several dictionaries into a massive super-dictionary!

Have fun.

Rob.

edited May 29 '11 at 21:53

orftz

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answered May 29 '11 at 06:21

ITRob

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score 2 · Answer 4 · answered May 29 '11 at 15:20

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I've used JSpell Evolution before. Once you get past the annoying installation/setup process, it works pretty well.

answered May 29 '11 at 15:20

Kon

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Javascript Spell Checking Methods

4 Answers4

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