About Letterbench

Letterbench is a small, independent site about words: a browser-based spell checker, a magnetic poetry board, and articles on spelling, word play and the code that powers both.

What you will find here

• The spell checker compares your text with an English word list of about 72,000 entries and proposes corrections. It runs entirely in your browser.
• The magnetic poetry board is a set of draggable word tiles for writing short poems, warming up before a writing session, or playing with children.
• Spelling & writing covers the words people commonly misspell, homophones, American versus British spelling and constraint-based writing prompts.
• Under the hood explains edit distance, suggestion ranking, drag-and-drop with Pointer Events and talking to a PHP back end from JavaScript, with code you can reuse.

How the tools treat your text

Neither tool has a server-side component. The spell checker downloads one static word list file and does all the checking on your device; words you add to "my words" are stored in your own browser's local storage and can be wiped with one button. The magnetic poetry board keeps your poem in the page; a shared link carries the poem in the part of the address after the #, which browsers do not send to the server.

How articles are written

• Every article is written for this site. Facts about the history of spelling, dictionaries or algorithms link to their sources: dictionaries, original papers, standards documents and reference works.
• Code samples are complete and are the same techniques the tools on this site use.
• When a source is uncertain or disputed, the article says so instead of picking a convenient version.

Credits

The spell checker's word lists are derived from SCOWL (Spell Checking Oriented Word Lists) by Kevin Atkinson, size 50, American and British variants. SCOWL is distributed under a permissive licence; its copyright notice is reproduced in full in SCOWL-COPYRIGHT.txt.

About this domain

From roughly 2008 to 2010 this domain hosted a personal blog by a web developer, with posts on PHP and jQuery, some creative writing, and two free web toys that many sites linked to: a spell-checker script with its own documentation and download page, and an online magnetic poetry toy that was also offered as a download. The domain later lapsed and was used by unrelated parties, including a period around 2020–2022 when it carried spam pages. Letterbench is a new, independent publication with no connection to the original author or to those later sites. No text, code or images from any earlier version are reused here; the spell checker and the magnetic poetry board were rewritten from scratch, and addresses that used to point to the old tools now lead to the new ones.

Corrections

Spotted a wrong fact, a broken suggestion or a word the checker should know? Corrections are welcome; the publisher's details are in the legal notice.