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:
Main features of Hunspell command line tool, developed by László Németh:
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 to help translate Hunspell.
Build only dependencies:
g++ make autoconf automake autopoint libtool
Runtime dependencies:
Mandatory | Optional | |
---|---|---|
libhunspell | ||
hunspell tool | libiconv gettext | ncurses readline |
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:
In Ubuntu, the packages are:
libncurses5-dev libreadline-dev
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
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.
Download and install Cygwin environment for Windows with the following extra packages:
Then compile the same way as on Linux. Cygwin builds depend on Cygwin1.dll.
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 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
features and dictionary format:
man 5 hunspell man hunspell hunspell -h
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
The src/tools directory contains the following executables after compiling.
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
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
Alternatively, you can build and install hunspell using vcpkg dependency manager:
git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git cd vcpkg ./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh ./vcpkg integrate install ./vcpkg install hunspell
The hunspell port in vcpkg is kept up to date by Microsoft team members and community contributors. If the version is out of date, please create an issue or pull request on the vcpkg repository.
Hunspell (MySpell) dictionaries:
Aspell dictionaries (conversion: man 5 hunspell):
László Németh, nemeth at numbertext org