Spelling Correction in Python with TextBlob

Introduction

Spelling mistakes are common, and most people are used to software indicating if a mistake was made. From autocorrect on our phones, to red underlining in text editors, spell checking is an essential feature for many different products.

The first program to implement spell checking was written in 1971 for the DEC PDP-10. Called SPELL, it was capable of performing only simple comparisons of words and detecting one or two letter differences. As hardware and software advanced, so have spell checkers. Modern spell checkers are capable of handling morphology and using statistics to improve suggestions.

Python offers many modules to use for this purpose, making writing a simple spell checker an easy 20-minute ordeal.

One of these libraries being TextBlob, which is used for natural language processing that provides an intuitive API to work with.

In this article we’ll take a look at how to implement spelling