Spell checking

Individual query terms and phrases are spell-checked against a dictionary. The spell check algorithm is normally based on the edit distance between a query term and the dictionary term. The edit distance is given by the number of basic character operations (add, delete, swap) required to transform the miss-spelled query term/phrase to the closest term in the dictionary.A special variant of spell check is the phonetic spell check, where the edit distance is computed based on a phonetic representation of the words.

See also Approximate matching.