Legacy spell-checking software, 2007–2019
ASPNetSpell · JavaScript SpellCheck · ASP Spell Check · PHP Spell Check · Nanospell · TinyMCE Spell Check · ASP Did You Mean · LiveSpell
These products are discontinued. They were sold and supported from 2007 to 2019 and are no longer downloaded, updated, licensed, or supported. Existing license holders may continue to use the copies they already have under their original license terms. No new license keys are issued.
What they were
Between 2007 and 2019 this family of components added spell checking to web applications, built for a web in which browsers could not yet check spelling on their own. Each product served one platform:
ASPNetSpell
aspnetspell.com
Spell checker for ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC in C# and VB.NET. A drag-and-drop SpellButton and SpellTextBox with as-you-type suggestions, international dictionaries, and rich HTML editor integration. Shipped as a DLL and on NuGet as Spell.Check.
JavaScript SpellCheck
javascriptspellcheck.com
Spell checking for any HTML page: form fields, textareas, and rich editors targeted by CSS selector. As-you-type and dialog modes, a jQuery plugin, native TinyMCE and CKEditor plugins, and UI translations in over 40 languages, with .NET, PHP, ASP, and Java back ends.
ASP Spell Check
aspspellcheck.com
Pure-ASP spell checker for Classic ASP websites and intranets. No installer or ActiveX: copy the files in and get as-you-type checking plus a Word-style dialog, with over 20 free dictionaries including medical, scientific, and legal English.
PHP Spell Check
phpspellcheck.com
A server-side PHP spell-checker class with up to 30 dictionaries and phonetic suggestion logic, paired with a front-end class rendering a SpellButton dialog or as-you-type checking on any textarea, input, or editor. Ran on Apache and IIS; integrated with phpBB, CKEditor, and TinyMCE.
Nanospell
nanospell.com
Privacy-first spell-check plugins for CKEditor 4 and TinyMCE with PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, and Java back ends. Never sent text to a remote service, never showed adverts, and worked in browsers that lacked spell checking of their own, with 24 free dictionaries.
TinyMCE Spell Check
tinymcespellcheck.com
The Nanospell spell-check plugin packaged for TinyMCE: inline as-you-type underlining and right-click suggestions inside the editor, with PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, and Java back ends and free international dictionaries.
ASP Did You Mean
aspdidyoumean.com
A Classic ASP component that added Google-style "Did you mean...?" spelling suggestions to site search boxes, using the same dictionaries and suggestion engine as ASP Spell Check.
LiveSpell
livespell.com
Early spell-check-as-you-type for web forms, later folded into the JavaScript SpellCheck and Nanospell product lines.
That world has changed. Every modern browser underlines misspellings natively, and the editors these plugins targeted ship spell checking of their own. The products have been retired rather than left to age without support.
What we recommend instead
- Browser-native spell checking. Set
spellcheck="true"on any textarea, input, or contenteditable element. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge underline typos and offer suggestions with no library at all. For most forms this replaces every product above. - Editor plugins. CKEditor 5 offers WProofreader and TinyMCE offers its Spell Checker plugin, both maintained by the editor vendors.
- Server-side or in-script checking. Hunspell-compatible open-source libraries: nspell for JavaScript and Node.js, WeCantSpell.Hunspell for .NET, and PHP's bundled Enchant extension.
What the team built next
The developers behind these products went on to found Iron Software, which builds document-processing libraries for .NET developers, used in enterprise applications worldwide:
- IronPDF — create, edit, and read PDFs
- IronOCR — OCR and text extraction
- IronXL — Excel spreadsheets without Office
- IronWord — Word documents
- IronBarcode — read and write barcodes
- IronZIP — archive handling
If you came here looking for a spell checker, the recommendations above will serve you better. If you build .NET applications that handle documents, Iron Software is where our work continues.