Enchant is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

project developed as part of the AbiWord

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices ded ...

with the aim of unifying access to the various existing

spell-checker In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text file, text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, el ...

software. Enchant wraps a common set of functionality present in a variety of existing products/libraries, and exposes a stable API/ABI for doing so. Where a library doesn't implement some specific functionality, Enchant will emulate it. Enchant is capable of having multiple backends loaded at once. As of January 2021 it has support for 7 backends: *

Hunspell Hunspell is a spell checker and morphological analyser designed for languages with rich morphology and complex word compounding and character encoding, originally designed for the Hungarian language. Hunspell is based on MySpell and is backwa ...

(spell checker used by LibreOffice, Firefox and

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macO ...

)
Nuspell
(modern spell checker compatible with

dictionaries) * Aspell (intends to replace Ispell)
Hspell
(Hebrew)
Voikko
(Finnish)
Zemberek
(Turkish) * AppleSpell (

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

) GNOME LaTeX and

gedit gedit ( or ) is a text editor designed for the GNOME desktop environment. It was GNOME's default text editor and part of the GNOME Core Applications until GNOME version 42 in March 2022, which changed the default text editor to GNOME Tex ...

rely on the gspell library, which uses Enchant. Enchant is currently licensed under

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

(LGPL), with an additional permission notice saying that any plugin backend can be loaded and used by Enchant. This ensures that it can use the native spell checkers on various platforms (Mac OS X,

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a ma ...

Amazon Kindle Amazon Kindle is a series of e-readers designed and marketed by Amazon. Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Stor ...

, etc.), and users can use their favorite third-party product to do the job.

References

External links

Project homepage

PyEnchant
- Python bindings for Enchant {{DEFAULTSORT:Enchant (Software) Free spelling checking programs Language software for Linux Language software for macOS Language software for Windows