Letterbench: a free online spell checker, a magnetic poetry board and notes on words

A free spell checker, a magnetic poetry board and plain notes on words

Two free tools that run in your browser, and plain-spoken notes on spelling, word play and the code behind them.

Spell checker

Paste any text, see unknown words underlined, pick a suggestion. American or British word list. Your text never leaves your device.

Open spell checker

Magnetic poetry

A fridge door on screen: drag word tiles into lines, shuffle the pile, add your own words and share the finished poem as a link.

Open the board
A slanted wooden printer's type case on a stand, its many small compartments holding metal letters
A printer's type case at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz: every letter in its own compartment. Photo: dronepicr, CC BY 2.0.

Private by design

Try the spell checker

Paste a paragraph and press Check spelling. Unknown words are underlined against an English list of about 72,000 entries; click one for suggestions, ignore it, or add it to your own words. Nothing is uploaded.

Check your own textHow suggestions are found

Spelling & writing

Everything in Spelling & writing
Close-up of two yellow wooden pencils with worn pink erasers held in metal ferrulesSpelling & writing

Commonly misspelled words

Accommodate, separate, definitely: the traps they set and the tricks that fix them.

 Close-up of an open dictionary, its dense columns of entries in sharp focus around the word focusSpelling & writing

American and British spelling

The handful of patterns behind color and colour, center and centre, -ize and -ise.

 A hand writing with a freshly sharpened yellow pencil on a lined spiral notebook, shavings on the pageSpelling & writing

Homophones spell checkers miss

Their, there, they're: real-word errors no dictionary lookup can catch.

 Black-and-white photograph of three-storey brick row houses with small For Rent cards in several ground-floor windowsSpelling & writing

Writing an honest rental listing

Cosy, bijou, professionals only: the words to cut from a rental advert, and what to say instead.

 Two pairs of cupped hands holding small letter tiles that spell FOREVER, above a grassy lawnSpelling & writing

Writing prompts for word tiles

Twenty-four prompts and Oulipo-style constraints, from warm-ups to N+7.

Under the hood

Everything in Under the hood
The parts of a dismantled mechanical typewriter laid out in neat rows on a white backgroundUnder the hood

How spell checkers work

Word lists, affix rules, edit distance and how suggestions get ranked.

 A screen of colourful JavaScript code shot at an angle, with only a few lines in focusUnder the hood

Levenshtein distance in JavaScript

Edit distance step by step, with the Damerau transposition variant.

 Close-up of a screen full of web stylesheet code, with small coloured swatches beside the colour valuesUnder the hood

The HTML spellcheck attribute

How spellcheck and lang decide what the browser underlines in your forms.

 Square wooden letter tiles scattered on an orange surface, six of them spelling the word VISIONUnder the hood

Draggable tiles with Pointer Events

Mouse, touch and pen with one code path, plus keyboard support.

 A dark code editor showing PHP template code with numbered lines, viewed at an angleUnder the hood

Talking to PHP from JavaScript

Sending and reading JSON with fetch or jQuery.ajax, the right way.

 A wooden type case filled with small metal letters, a composing stick of set type lying across itUnder the hood

Spell checker documentation

Where the 72,000-word list comes from and how suggestions are ranked.