ppspell for languages other than English

[casper]

Can the ppspell webapp work with languages other than English?

[rfrank]

Thanks for asking about ppspell. The word list used by that program was built by scanning thousands of public domain books that were written in English. Therefore the ppspell webapp would report most foreign words as spelling error suspects.

A wordlist could be built specific to any language by generating a word frequency map based on books written in that language. This differs from traditional dictionary approaches in that the program doesn't know the definition of the word. It only knows that it appears spelled that way in many books. Higher word frequency means more likely to be a valid word.

Right now, the only wordlist ppspell has to work with is English.