Moore misspellings

Miss Spellings.

Spellcheck is no longer sufficient. Spellcheck won't help you with homophones, words that sound the same but are spelled differently. I have recently seen all of these on the internet:

  • Bring to heal vs heel.
  • by vs buy.
  • baring vs bearing.
  • there vs their.
  • worth while vs worthwhile.
  • lightening vs lightning.

On a whim, I searched for grammar/spelling checkers online and found https://github.com/Automattic/harper/ . I tried it out. It is not for me (because I write more code than prose and it doesn't do code and it was telling me stuff like "you have two spaces here. You should only have one." which it was absolutely wrong about) and it couldn't detect run-on sentences, but I think that it is a good idea.

Harper (the software) isn't an AI Large Language Model. It seems to be a set of heuristics. It seems that people have forgotten about heuristics. I did try it and it missed a lot of bad grammar and its spellchecker is shite. I was trying to figure out how to add my own heuristics. It seems to be written in the Haskell programming language, which I don't know.

[Update, July 3rd: Maybe I was too critical of Harper's (the program's) spellchecker. It seems that all spellcheckers are shite. I tried, aspell, hunspell, and languagetool. They all had very easily found deficiencies. The language has changed, especially when it comes to computer and internet words. We don't hyphenate web-page anymore, for example. Harper is being actively developed, so it is definitely one to watch. ]

Currently I use aspell on linux for spellchecking. I have some stardict dictionaries for looking up the meanings of words (using sdcv). It seems weird to me that it was a bit difficult to get offline dictionaries! Everything is online now! An offline grammar checker is a good idea. Big business? Grammarly has a lot of users. Do they pay? I heard that Grammarly went AI. It was trulyn't [sic] a good thing.

Grammarly made an AI mistake.
Twas trulyn't a fine hour, for the magical machine of artifice didst mangle the grammar of our speech. --AI probably.
[Image lifted from the interwebs.]

I'm just thinking right now about making a checker for common English homophones. Also, maybe reference a list of common idioms and do fuzzy matching against them. That is where I see a lot of misspellings.

So, yeah, uh, I did this and it changed my life.