History
Research extends back to 1957, including spelling checkers for bitmap images of cursive writing and special applications to find records in databases in spite of incorrect entries. In 1961, Les Earnest, who headed the research on this budding technology, saw it necessary to include the first spell checker that accessed a list of 10,000 acceptable words. Ralph Gorin, a graduate student under Earnest at the time, created the first true spelling checker program written as an applications program (rather than research) for general English text: Spell for the DEC PDP-10 at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in February 1971. Gorin wrote SPELL in assembly language, for faster action; he made the first spelling corrector by searching the word list for plausible correct spellings that differ by a single letter or adjacent letter transpositions and presenting them to the user. Gorin made SPELL publicly accessible, as was done with most SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) programs, and it soon spread around the world via the new ARPAnet, about ten years before personal computers came into general use. Spell, its algorithms and data structures inspired the Unix ispell program.
The first spell checkers were widely available on mainframe computers in the late 1970s. A group of six linguists from Georgetown University developed the first spell-check system for the IBM corporation.
The company Software Concepts, Inc., founded by William J. Tobin in 1978, developed one of the first patented computer software programs in the United States for spelling verification. The program was used by most major word-processing and photo-typesetting systems, including Lanier, Philips, and Xerox, among many others. The patent the company was issued in 1980 for the Spell-Checking program was one of the first software patents issued in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
The first spell checkers for personal computers appeared for CP/M and TRS-80 computers in 1980, followed by packages for the IBM PC after it was introduced in 1981. Developers such as Maria Mariani, Soft-Art, Microlytics, Proximity, Circle Noetics, and Reference Software rushed OEM packages or end-user products into the rapidly expanding software market, primarily for the PC but also for Apple Macintosh, VAX, and Unix. On the PCs, these spell checkers were standalone programs, many of which could be run in TSR mode from within word-processing packages on PCs with sufficient memory.
However, the market for standalone packages was short-lived, as by the mid 1980s developers of popular word-processing packages like WordStar and WordPerfect had incorporated spell checkers in their packages, mostly licensed from the above companies, who quickly expanded support from just English to European and eventually even Asian languages. However, this required increasing sophistication in the morphology routines of the software, particularly with regard to heavily-agglutinative languages like Hungarian and Finnish. Although the size of the word-processing market in a country like Iceland might not have justified the investment of implementing a spell checker, companies like WordPerfect nonetheless strove to localize their software for as many as possible national markets as part of their global marketing strategy.
Recently, spell checking has moved beyond word processors as Firefox 2.0, a web browser, has spell check support for user-written content, such as when editing Wikitext, writing on many webmail sites, blogs, and social networking websites. The web browsers Google Chrome, Konqueror, and Opera, the email client Kmail and the instant messaging client Pidgin also offer spell checking support, transparently using GNU Aspell as their engine. Mac OS X now has spell check systemwide, extending the service to virtually all bundled and third party applications.
Read more about this topic: Spell Checker
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