The Hspell Project
"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of spelling errors."
The Hspell project is a free Hebrew linguistic project.
Its primary goal is to create a free Hebrew spell-checker. We have already achieved that goal, and you are invited to Download the latest version of the spell-checker. It is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL v3).
In addition to a spell-checker, the project also produced a Hebrew morphological analyzer, which for every valid Hebrew word lists all of its possible readings (valid combinations of prefix and inflected base word), and for each reading describe its part-of-speech, gender, tense, and other attributes.
The secondary goal of the project is to make the algorithms and dictionaries, created initially for the spell-checker, freely available. These could be used in more sophisticated research or applications that require Hebrew word lists or a Hebrew morphology engine.
Such potential application areas might include search engines, speech synthesis, and much much more. The availability of a free basis will hopefully encourage free development on top of it, to the benefit of the general Hebrew-speaking population.
Hspell was written by Nadav Har'El and Dan Kenigsberg.
June 24, 2017
Hspell 1.4 released
This month, the Academy of the Hebrew Language announced a new spelling standard for Hebrew. The new spelling standard adds the letters yod and wow in additional cases beyond what the previous standard specified.
Because of this, we are releasing today Hspell 1.4 which will be the last version of Hspell to follow the old spelling standard. This release also includes a complete document (in Hebrew, 110 pages) about Hspell 1.4's spelling standard.
See the What's New file for more details on this and other Hspell releases.February 25, 2015
Hspell 1.3 released
Hspell 1.3 was released. This release continues to enlarge Hspell's vocabulary and improve its accuracy, and expands the documentation of Hspell's spelling standard. See the What's New file for more details.
February 28, 2012
Hspell 1.2 released
Hspell 1.2 was released. This release continues to enlarge Hspell's vocabulary and improve its accuracy, continues to document Hspell's spelling standard, and fixes various bugs. See the What's New file for more details.
In this release, Hspell's license was switched from GPL to AGPL. This means that using Hspell to provide closed-source online services is no longer acceptable. Contact us if you do need to use Hspell in closed-source software or online services.
December 31, 2009
Hspell 1.1 released
After a long hiatus, Hspell 1.1 was released. This release continues to enlarge Hspell's vocabulary and improve its accuracy, and for the first time documents Hspell's spelling standard (in Hebrew). See the What's New file for more details.
March 4, 2009 Hspell's Website available again
After more than a year that ivrix.org.il has been unavailable and the Hspell project has been without a site, the project site is back, thanks to SourceForge.net.
May 16, 2006
Hspell 1.0 released
Hspell 1.0 was released. In this version, Hspell's vocabulary has grown by 1,500 more base words, reaching a total of over 22,500. We now consider this vocabulary to be mature, and large enough to satisfy most users. As usual, the new version also features other improvements and bug fixes - see the What's New file for more details.
March 12, 2006
Gmail uses Hspell
Google's mail service, Gmail, now supports spell-checking of Hebrew messages. Internally, it uses Hspell's word list. A mirror of Hspell 0.9 also appears on Google's site.
January 13, 2005
Hspell 0.9 released
Hspell 0.9 was released. This version features the biggest vocabulary increase of any one previous release (2500 words), and is one of the final steps towards the goal of making Hspell's coverage of the modern Hebrew language complete.
Additionally, "Personal dictionary" write support was added to the ispell-like front end, finally enabling the "add word" feature in applications that use Hspell (such as LyX and KDE). And as usual, many other improvements and bug fixes were made. See the What's New file for more information.