Spell Checking

Dictionary-based spell checking with Unicode-aware tokenization and light text normalization. Supports 62 languages via compressed Marisa-Trie dictionaries. Returns a compact report with the total number of misspellings and the list of offending tokens.

Behavior

• Normalizes common Unicode quirks (e.g., smart quotes, zero-width joiners).

• Ignores numbers and leading/trailing punctuation when deciding correctness.

• Treats '/’ variants as equivalent.

• Looks up each token against the selected language dictionary.

Parameters

Parameter	Description
text	(str) Raw input text.
language	(str, default "en") ISO-639 code.
dict_dir	(str | Path | None) Directory containing one or more *.marisa.zst (or decompressed *.marisa) dictionaries. If None: uses a per-user cache directory and auto-downloads the required dictionary if missing.
use_mmap	(bool, default False) True → memory-map the on-disk .marisa file (lowest RAM; fastest startup; OS page cache warms on first queries). False → load the entire trie into RAM (higher RAM; highest steady-state throughput).

Return value

dict with:

• errors_count – int total misspellings

• errors – list[str] of misspelled tokens (normalized/case-folded)

Examples

Basic

import textwizard as tw

res = tw.correctness_text("Thiss sentense has a typo.", language="en")
print(res)

Output

{"errors_count": 2, "errors": ["thiss", "sentense"]}

import textwizard as tw
print(tw.correctness_text("Queso è un tes , di preva.", language="it"))

Output

{"errors_count": 3, "errors": ["queso", "tes", "preva."]}

Custom dictionary directory & mmap

import textwizard as tw
from pathlib import Path

res = tw.correctness_text(
    "Coloar centre thetre",
    language="en",
    dict_dir=Path("~/textwizard_dicts"),
    use_mmap=True,
)
print(res)

Output

{"errors_count": 2, "errors": ["coloar", "thetre"]}

Operational notes

• Cache location (when dict_dir=None): a per-user data directory is used. You can override it via the first existing of: TEXTWIZARD_DATA_DIR / TEXTWIZARD_DICT_DIR / TEXTWIZARD_HOME (environment variables).

• Auto-download: when a dictionary is missing and dict_dir is not set, TextWizard downloads the compressed *.marisa.zst once and reuses it subsequently.

• File formats: - *.marisa.zst files are decompressed on the fly (into memory) or to an adjacent *.marisa file when use_mmap=True. - If you already have an uncompressed *.marisa file in dict_dir, it is used directly.

• Performance: - use_mmap=True → minimal RAM, fastest startup; excellent for large dictionaries or constrained environments. - use_mmap=False → maximal throughput once loaded; best when RAM is plentiful.

• Chinese requires jieba; all other languages work out-of-the-box.

• Output tokens in errors are normalized/case-folded; they may differ in casing from the original text.

Available dictionaries

Code	Language
af	Afrikaans
an	Aragonese
ar	Arabic
as	Assamese
be	Belarusian
bg	Bulgarian
bn	Bengali
bo	Tibetan
br	Breton
bs	Bosnian
ca	Catalan
cs	Czech
da	Danish
de	German
el	Greek
en	English
eo	Esperanto
es	Spanish
fa	Persian
fr	French
gd	Scottish Gaelic
gn	Guarani
gu	Gujarati (gu_IN)
he	Hebrew
hi	Hindi
hr	Croatian
id	Indonesian
is	Icelandic
it	Italian
ja	Japanese
kmr	Kurmanji Kurdish
kn	Kannada
ku	Central Kurdish
lo	Lao
lt	Lithuanian
lv	Latvian
mr	Marathi
nb	Norwegian Bokmål
ne	Nepali
nl	Dutch
nn	Norwegian Nynorsk
oc	Occitan
or	Odia
pa	Punjabi
pl	Polish
pt	Portuguese (EU)
ro	Romanian
ru	Russian
sa	Sanskrit
si	Sinhala
sk	Slovak
sl	Slovenian
sq	Albanian
sr	Serbian
sv	Swedish
sw	Swahili
ta	Tamil
te	Telugu
th	Thai
tr	Turkish
uk	Ukrainian
vi	Vietnamese

See also

• TextWizard — Overview and quick start

• Language Detection — Language identification