Date: 2008mar3 Q. What are the open source spell checkers? A. Its confusing. If you search, you'll find there are large number of open source spell checkers. But there's the simple answer: spell The first spell checker. It was built into Unix. Simply listed misspelt words. ispell International Spell checker. Gave line numbers where the mistake was and suggestions. Dictionaries for multiple languages. aspell Better spell English suggestions that ispell. Can emulate ispell so was a drop-in replacement. Also had dictionaries for multiple languages. But only Western languages was was ASCII-based. For now, this is the king. Dictionaries for many languages available as packages for Fedora/RedHat/CentOS. dspell Dave Spell. I made this as a programming experiment. A drop in replacement for ispell or aspell. Suggestions are almost certainly as good as aspell but it basically works and has very minimal dependencies so easy to compile. hunspell Hungarian spell checker. Supports Unicode and all languages. This appears to be the rising star. Already the default spell checker of OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird.