About Hunspell

NOTICE: Verison 2 is in the works. For contributing see version 2 specification and the folder src/hunspell2.

Hunspell is a spell checker and morphological analyzer library and program designed for languages with rich morphology and complex word compounding or character encoding. Hunspell interfaces: Ispell-like terminal interface using Curses library, Ispell pipe interface, C++ class and C functions.

Hunspell's code base comes from the OpenOffice.org MySpell (http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/MySpell-3.zip). See README.MYSPELL, AUTHORS.MYSPELL and license.myspell files. Hunspell is designed to eventually replace Myspell in OpenOffice.org.

Main features of Hunspell spell checker and morphological analyzer:

• Unicode support (affix rules work only with the first 65535 Unicode characters)
• Morphological analysis (in custom item and arrangement style) and stemming
• Max. 65535 affix classes and twofold affix stripping (for agglutinative languages, like Azeri, Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, etc.)
• Support complex compoundings (for example, Hungarian and German)
• Support language specific features (for example, special casing of Azeri and Turkish dotted i, or German sharp s)
• Handle conditional affixes, circumfixes, fogemorphemes, forbidden words, pseudoroots and homonyms.
• Free software. Versions 1.x are licenced under LGPL, GPL, MPL tri-license. Version 2 is licenced only under GNU LGPL.

Compiling on Unix/Linux and others

autoreconf -vfi
./configure
make
make install    #if neccesary prefix with sudo
ldconfig        #not needed on windows, on linux sudo may be needed

For dictionary development, use the --with-warnings option of configure.

For interactive user interface of Hunspell executable, use the --with-ui option.

The developer packages you need to compile Hunspell's interface:

autoconf automake autopoint libtool g++

optional developer packages:

• ncurses (need for --with-ui), eg. libncursesw5 for UTF-8
• readline (for fancy input line editing, configure parameter: --with-readline)
• locale and gettext (but you can also use the --with-included-gettext configure parameter)

Compiling on Windows

1. 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.

2. Compiling in Cygwin environment

---

Download and install Cygwin environment for Windows with the following extra packages:

• make
• automake
• autoconf
• gcc-g++ development package
• ncurses, readline (for user interface)
• iconv (character conversion)

###3.1. Cygwin1.dll dependent compiling

Same as on Linux.

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

The src/tools dictionary contains ten executables after compiling:

• affixcompress: dictionary generation from large (millions of words) vocabularies
• analyze: example of spell checking, stemming and morphological analysis
• chmorph: example of automatic morphological generation and conversion
• example: example of spell checking and suggestion
• hunspell: main program for spell checking and others (see manual)
• hunzip: decompressor of hzip format
• hzip: compressor of hzip format
• makealias: alias compression (Hunspell only, not back compatible with MySpell)
• munch: dictionary generation from vocabularies (it needs an affix file, too).
• unmunch: list all recognized words of a MySpell dictionary
• wordforms: word generation (Hunspell version of unmunch)

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_UK -l <text.txt

Dictionaries consist of an affix and dictionary file, see tests/ or http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries.

Using Hunspell library with GCC

Including in your program:

#include <hunspell.hxx>

Linking with Hunspell static library:

g++ -lhunspell example.cxx 

Dictionaries

Myspell & Hunspell dictionaries:

• http://extensions.libreoffice.org
• http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/dictionaries
• http://extensions.openoffice.org
• http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries

Aspell dictionaries (need some conversion):

• ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict

Conversion steps: see relevant feature request at http://hunspell.github.io/ .

László Németh nemeth at numbertext org