Hunspell: Help for your word searches
Because Latin is an inflected language and has used different spelling conventions over its long existence, it can be difficult to determine the correct dictionary look-up form (or lemma) of a given word. For example, if you search for junctus (for the Classical iunctus) or amaverat (an inflected form of amo), you most likely won’t get any hits.
Hunspell is a free spell checker that performs automatic lemmatization. In addition to inflections and letter variants, it can handle ligatures (pæne for paene) and diacritics (curâ or malè) that can otherwise complicate a word search.
If you misspell a word or enter one that Hunspell cannot lemmatize, it will offer a list of suggestions. (See image.)
Note: Unfortunately, Hunspell does not work well with Ancient Greek.
Hunspell dictionaries
Hunspell is already loaded on GoldenDict. But before you can activate it, Hunspell needs its own dictionary. Currently, there are two good options for Latin:
- A Latin Spellchecker by Karl Zeiler and Jean-Pierre Sutto. This vast dictionary contains more than 130,000 words from all periods of Latin. (Click the link in step 1 of the instructions below to download the file directly.)
- A Classical Latin Spelling Dictionary by Konrad Kokoszkiewicz. (Scroll to the very bottom of the linked page.) This strictly Classical lexicon is limited to words from before the end of the second century C.E.
Note: Both of these dictionaries can be used for spellchecking in other apps, including LibreOffice, Chrome, and Firefox.
Set up Hunspell on GoldenDict
- Download the Hunspell dictionary and extract the files.
- In the GoldenDict app, navigate to the Morphology window:
- In the menu bar, go to Edit > Dictionaries.
- Select the Sources tab in the Dictionaries window. (It should be selected by default; see image below.)
- Select the Morphology sub-tab.
- Set your Hunspell dictionary:
- Press the Change… button, near the top of the Morphology window. This will open a popup window.
- Navigate to the folder where you saved the extracted Hunspell dictionary.
- Click Open. (You’ll see the path to your selected dictionary appear in the field next to the Change… button.)
- Enable (check on) “Latin Morphology,” and press OK.
Mobile applications
Two dictionary shells for Android, GoldenDict Mobile and MDict, support Hunspell. While MDict provides an iOS version, we have not tested whether adding spelling dictionaries is possible there.
Download the Hunspell dictionary and extract the files la_LA.aff and la_LA.dic.
GoldenDict Mobile
Copy files la_LA.aff and la_LA.dic to the phone’s memory, into the GoldenDict folder. Run the application, and it will recognize them as a new dictionary.
MDict
Copy files la_LA.aff and la_LA.dic to the phone’s memory, into the “/mdict/data/” folder.