Hunspell Tutorial

This page shows you the basics of using hunspell.

Hunspell is a mature and modern spell checker, better than aspell. It is used by Apple, Google, Opera, Firefox, OpenOffice.org.

The info on this page is tested with hunspell version 1.2.8.

Hunspell home page is at http://hunspell.github.io/ . Basic history at Wikipedia Hunspell .

# short usage summary
hunspell -h

hunspell -d en_US

Setting Environment Variables Path

If you have problem starting hunspell, you might need to set up some Environment Variables. [see Windows Environment Variable Tutorial] Here's some example on Windows using cmd.exe:

Windows with cmd.exe

Here is a example for adding hunspell executable to environment variable PATH in Windows Vista using cmd.exe:

setx PATH "C:\Program Files (x86)\ErgoEmacs 1.8.1\hunspell\;%PATH%"

You also need to set its dictionary file path. Like this:

setx DICTIONARY "en_US"
setx DICPATH "C:\Program Files (x86)\ErgoEmacs 1.8.1\hunspell"

Note: hunspell 1.2.8 Windows port has a bug. The DICTIONARY and or DICPATH paths must be set in the Windows Registry. It won't work if these are set as session variables.

Once you have set these env vars, you can just type “hunspell” in any dir in the command line.

Unix with Bash

On unix bash, do it like this:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
export DICTIONARY=en-US
export DICPATH=/usr/lib/firefox/dictionaries

Simple Usage

hunspell -d en_US filename.txt

cat myFile.txt | hunspell
hunspell -l myFile.txt

cat myFile.txt | hunspell -i utf-8 | grep -v \* | uniq

cat myFile.txt | hunspell -l -i utf-8

cat myFile.txt | hunspell -l -i utf-8

echo badword | hunspell

echo somee words ar good some badd | hunspell