# About Hunspell
Hunspell is a free spell checker and morphological analyzer library
and command-line tool, licensed under LGPL/GPL/MPL tri-license.
Hunspell is used by LibreOffice office suite, free browsers, like
Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, and other tools and OSes, like
Linux distributions and macOS. It is also a command-line tool for
Linux, Unix-like and other OSes.
It is designed for quick and high quality spell checking and
correcting for languages with word-level writing system,
including languages with rich morphology, complex word compounding
and character encoding.
Hunspell interfaces: Ispell-like terminal interface using Curses
library, Ispell pipe interface, C++/C APIs and shared library, also
with existing language bindings for other programming languages.
Hunspell's code base comes from OpenOffice.org's MySpell library,
developed by Kevin Hendricks (originally a C++ reimplementation of
spell checking and affixation of Geoff Kuenning's International
Ispell from scratch, later extended with eg. n-gram suggestions),
see http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/MySpell-3.zip, and
its README, CONTRIBUTORS and license.readme (here: license.myspell) files.
Main features of Hunspell library, developed by László Németh:
- Unicode support
- Highly customizable suggestions: word-part replacement tables and
stem-level phonetic and other alternative transcriptions to recognize
and fix all typical misspellings, don't suggest offensive words etc.
- Complex morphology: dictionary and affix homonyms; twofold affix
stripping to handle inflectional and derivational morpheme groups for
agglutinative languages, like Azeri, Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian,
Turkish; 64 thousand affix classes with arbitrary number of affixes;
conditional affixes, circumfixes, fogemorphemes, zero morphemes,
virtual dictionary stems, forbidden words to avoid overgeneration etc.
- Handling complex compounds (for example, for Finno-Ugric, German and
Indo-Aryan languages): recognizing compounds made of arbitrary
number of words, handle affixation within compounds etc.
- Custom dictionaries with affixation
- Stemming
- Morphological analysis (in custom item and arrangement style)
- Morphological generation
- SPELLML XML API over plain spell() API function for easier integration
of stemming, morpological generation and custom dictionaries with affixation
- Language specific algorithms, like special casing of Azeri or Turkish
dotted i and German sharp s, and special compound rules of Hungarian.
Main features of Hunspell command line tool, developed by László Németh:
- Reimplementation of quick interactive interface of Geoff Kuenning's Ispell
- Parsing formats: text, OpenDocument, TeX/LaTeX, HTML/SGML/XML, nroff/troff
- Custom dictionaries with optional affixation, specified by a model word
- Multiple dictionary usage (for example hunspell -d en_US,de_DE,de_medical)
- Various filtering options (bad or good words/lines)
- Morphological analysis (option -m)
- Stemming (option -s)
See man hunspell, man 3 hunspell, man 5 hunspell for complete manual.
Translations: Hunspell has been translated into several languages already. If your language is missing or incomplete, please use [Weblate](https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/hunspell/) to help translate Hunspell.
<a href="https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/hunspell/">
<img src="https://hosted.weblate.org/widgets/hunspell/-/translations/horizontal-auto.svg" alt="Stanje prijevoda" />
</a>
# Dependencies
Build only dependencies:
g++ make autoconf automake autopoint libtool
Runtime dependencies:
| | Mandatory | Optional |
|---------------|------------------|------------------|
|libhunspell | | |
|hunspell tool | libiconv gettext | ncurses readline |
# Compiling on GNU/Linux and Unixes
We first need to download the dependencies. On Linux, `gettext` and
`libiconv` are part of the standard library. On other Unixes we
need to manually install them.
For Ubuntu:
sudo apt install autoconf automake autopoint libtool
Then run the following commands:
autoreconf -vfi
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
For dictionary development, use the `--with-warnings` option of
configure.
For interactive user interface of Hunspell executable, use the
`--with-ui` option.
Optional developer packages:
- ncurses (need for --with-ui), eg. libncursesw5 for UTF-8
- readline (for fancy input line editing, configure parameter:
--with-readline)
In Ubuntu, the packages are:
libncurses5-dev libreadline-dev
# Compiling on OSX and macOS
On macOS for compiler always use `clang` and not `g++` because Homebrew
dependencies are build with that.
brew install autoconf automake libtool gettext
brew link gettext --force
Then run:
autoreconf -vfi
./configure
make
# Compiling on Windows
## Compiling with Mingw64 and MSYS2
Download Msys2, update everything and install the following
packages:
pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-libtool
Open Mingw-w64 Win64 prompt and compile the same way as on Linux, see
above.
## Compiling in Cygwin environment
Download and install Cygwin environment for Windows with the following
extra packages:
- make
- automake
- autoconf
- libtool
- gcc-g++ development package
- ncurses, readline (for user interface)
- iconv (character conversion)
Then compile the same way as on Linux. Cygwin builds depend on
Cygwin1.dll.
# Debugging
It is recommended to install a debug build of the standard library:
libstdc++6-6-dbg
For debugging we need to create a debug build and then we need to start
`gdb`.
./configure CXXFLAGS='-g -O0 -Wall -Wextra'
make
./libtool --mode=execute gdb src/tools/hunspell
You can also pass the `CXXFLAGS` directly to `make` without calling
`./configure`, but we don't recommend this way during long development
sessions.
If you like to develop and debug with an IDE, see documentation at
https://github.com/hunspell/hunspell/wiki/IDE-Setup
# Testing
Testing Hunspell (see tests in tests/ subdirectory):
make check
or with Valgrind debugger:
make check
VALGRIND=[Valgrind_tool] make check
For example:
make check
VALGRIND=memcheck make check
# Documentation
features and dictionary format:
man 5 hunspell
man hunspell
hunspell -h
http://hunspell.github.io/
# Usage
After compiling and installing (see INSTALL) you can run the Hunspell
spell checker (compiled with user interface) with a Hunspell or Myspell
dictionary:
hunspell -d en_US text.txt
or without interface:
hunspell
hunspell -d en_GB -l <text.txt
Dictionaries consist of an affix (.aff) and dictionary (.dic) file, for
example, download American English dictionary files of LibreOffice
(older version, but with stemming and morphological generation) with
wget -O en_US.aff https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries/plain/en/en_US.aff?id=a4473e06b56bfe35187e302754f6baaa8d75e54f
wget -O en_US.dic https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries/plain/en/en_US.dic?id=a4473e06b56bfe35187e302754f6baaa8d75e54f
and with command line input and output, it's possible to check its work quickly,
for example with the input words "example", "examples", "teached" and
"verybaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad":
$ hunspell -d en_US
Hunspell 1.7.0
example
*
examples
+ example
teached
& teached 9 0: taught, teased, reached, teaches, teacher, leached, beached
verybaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad
# verybaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad 0
Where in the output, `*` and `+` mean correct (accepted) words (`*` = dictionary stem,
`+` = affixed forms of the following dictionary stem), and
`&` and `#` mean bad (rejected) words (`&` = with suggestions, `#` = without suggestions)
(see man hunspell).
Example for stemming:
$ hunspell -d en_US -s
mice
mice mouse
Example for morphological analysis (very limited with this English dictionary):
$ hunspell -d en_US -m
mice
mice st:mouse ts:Ns
cats
cats st:cat ts:0 is:Ns
cats st:cat ts:0 is:Vs
# Other executables
The src/tools directory contains the following executables after compiling.
- The main executable:
- hunspell: main program for spell checking and others (see
manual)
- Example tools:
- analyze: example of spell checking, stemming and morphological
analysis
- chmorph: example of automatic morphological generation and
conversion
- example: example of spell checking and suggestion
- Tools for dictionary development:
- affixcompress: dictionary generation from large (millions of
words) vocabularies
- makealias: alias compression (Hunspell only, not back compatible
with MySpell)
- wordforms: word generation (Hunspell version of unmunch)
- hunzip: decompressor of hzip format
- hzip: compressor of hzip format
- munch (DEPRECATED, use affixcompress): dictionary generation
from vocabularies (it needs an affix file, too).
- unmunch (DEPRECATED, use wordforms): list all recognized words
of a MySpell dictionary
Example for morphological generation:
$ ~/hunspell/src/tools/analyze en_US.aff en_US.dic /dev/stdin
cat mice
generate(cat, mice) = cats
mouse cats
generate(mouse, cats) = mice
generate(mouse, cats) = mouses
# Using Hunspell library with GCC
Including in your program:
#include <hunspell.hxx>
Linking with Hunspell static library:
g++ -lhunspell-1.7 example.cxx
# or better, use pkg-config
g++ $(pkg-config --cflags --libs hunspell) example.cxx
## Dictionaries
Hunspell (MySpell) dictionaries:
- https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Language_support_of_LibreOffice
- http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries
- http://extensions.libreoffice.org
- https://extensions.openoffice.org
- https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries
Aspell dictionaries (conversion: man 5 hunspell):
- ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict
László Németh, nemeth at numbertext org
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