Enchant (software)

Enchant is a free software project developed as part of the AbiWord word processor with the aim of unifying access to the various existing spell-checker software. Enchant wraps a common set of functionality present in a variety of existing products/libraries, and exposes a stable API/ABI for doing so. Where a library doesn't implement some specific functionality, Enchant will emulate it.

Enchant

Original author(s)	AbiWord developers / Dom Lachowicz
Developer(s)	Enchant developers / Reuben Thomas
Stable release	2.8.2[1] / 14 August 2024; 7 months ago (14 August 2024)
Repository	github.com/rrthomas/enchant
Written in	C, C++, and Vala (programming language)
Operating system	Linux, BSDs, Mac OS X, Windows
Size	~1.3MB (source code only)
Type	Spell checker
License	Variant of LGPL[2]
Website	rrthomas.github.io/enchant[3]

Enchant is capable of having multiple backends loaded at once. As of January 2021 it has support for 7 backends:

• Hunspell (spell checker used by LibreOffice, Firefox and Google Chrome)
• Nuspell (modern spell checker compatible with Hunspell dictionaries)
• Aspell (intends to replace Ispell)
• Hspell (Hebrew)
• Voikko (Finnish)
• Zemberek (Turkish)
• AppleSpell (macOS)

GNOME LaTeX and gedit rely on the gspell library, which uses Enchant.^[4][5][6]

Enchant is currently licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), with an additional permission notice saying that any plugin backend can be loaded and used by Enchant. This ensures that it can use the native spell checkers on various platforms (Mac OS X, Microsoft Office, Amazon Kindle, etc.), and users can use their favorite third-party product to do the job.