When was spell checker invented

Education Sector. Microsoft Localization. Microsoft PnP. Healthcare and Life Sciences. Internet of Things IoT. Enabling Remote Work. Small and Medium Business. Humans of IT. Green Tech. While that does sound scary, the survey doesn't indicate whether spelling is rising or falling in Britannia. Our guess: you would have found the same results 10 years ago, better spellers 50 years ago, and much worse spellers years ago.

But the results have led the group that commissioned the study, the Mencap's Spellathon Championships, to an headline-grabbing conclusion: Auto-correct is making us stupid. This may be true, but it is hardly a sudden development. Bad spelling has plagued typists since at least as long as computer spell-check has existed.

Back in , writing for The New Yorker Thessaly La-Force highlighted a year study which that found typists had gotten worse at spelling. The study looked at the most common errors in undergraduate papers, finding the prevalence of word screw-ups, rather than grammar errors, had increased between and On Tuesday, I wrote about the research of Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University who examined the prose of college students over the course of five years.

Lunsford found that the Internet and social media had had a positive effect, encouraging students to write more and to have a better sense of their audience. But what about our spelling? I wondered. But the electronic spell checker, it became clear, needed to include proper nouns, including commercial names, that were not commonly included in the print dictionary. But under the tutelage of Dr. One thing led to another. Could you develop spell checkers for foreign languages?

Yes, you could. Could you tune spell checkers so as to respond to the needs of nonnative. English speakers? Yes, and Chinese and Japanese working in English would find your product highly desirable. If you were beginning to parse automatically, how about combined spelling and grammar correction? If you knew a lot about the relationships between phonemes and graphemes, how about speech-to-print products?

Or, turning them inside out, how about speech generation?