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.
20
votes
4 Answers
30
votes
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.
8
votes
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
inkeyword 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.
3
votes
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
0
votes
Yahoo provides spell checking API through YQL.
Its pretty simple and you get 5000 queries/ip address/day for non-commercial use (FREE)
