Installing hunspell on MacOS

Hunspell is a spell checker library written in C++. It also has bindings for other languages. This guide covers installation of python library on MacOS.

Requirements

• Homebrew - package manager for MacOS
• pip - package manager for Python

Installation

• Install hunspell library and tools

brew install hunspell

• Download dictionaries from http://wordlist.aspell.net/dicts/ and put them to /Library/Spelling/.

• Check that hunspell is able to load them:

$ hunspell -D

LOADED DICTIONARY:
/Library/Spelling/en_US.aff
/Library/Spelling/en_US.dic

• Install python bindings

export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/local/include/hunspell
sudo ln -sf /usr/local/lib/libhunspell-1.4.a /usr/local/lib/libhunspell.a
pip install hunspell

• Verify that it works

>>> import hunspell
>>> hobj = hunspell.HunSpell('/Library/Spelling/en_US.dic', '/Library/Spelling/en_US.aff')
>>> hobj.suggest('spookie')
['spookier', 'spookiness', 'spook', 'cookie', 'bookie', 'Spokane', 'spoken']

Reference

• hunspell home page - https://github.com/blatinier/pyhunspell
• pyhunspell - https://github.com/blatinier/pyhunspell