CALL's Supportive Writing Technology  book, published in 1999, contained detailed comparisons of most of the spellcheckers available at the time. We recently had a look at some of the new spellchecking tools that have become available over recent years and compared them with popular writing support tools used in schools and colleges. Ghotit, and Ginger are context-based spellcheckers which analyse text sentence by sentence and require an internet connection. There are restrictions on the programs that they can be used with: Ghotit can only be used within Microsoft Word, while Ginger can be used with other programs within Microsoft Office. Oribi VeritySpell is a more traditional standalone spellchecker, that can be used with any program, provided that you can select individual words with a mouse. We compared all three with Microsoft Word, Read and Write Gold and ClaroRead.

We compared the performance of all six programs at identifying incorrect words (including the ability to cope with 'real word errors') and offering the correct word at the top of a list of options. The ideal spellchecker would always recognise incorrect words and offer just one alternative - the correct word. No spellchecker comes close to achieving this, but Ghotit, Ginger and VeritySpell all performed very well in tests and showed that they can be very effective tools for correcting spelling..

Details of our tests, the results and details of the programs can be found in our free quick guide,  Advanced Spellcheckers Compared: Ghotit, Ginger and Oribi VeritySpell.