Shaw-Spell

Tl;dr: I have created native Shavian spell-checking and dictionary services for macOS, and will make them available soon!

As you will have gathered from my writings here and on Reddit, I’ve been tinkering away on some tools for the Shavian alphabet:

• I wanted a better native iOS virtual keyboard with my own keyboard layout -> I built Shaw Keys (as of yet unreleased) ✅
• I wanted a native Safari transliteration plugin for iOS and macOS -> I built the Shave extension (built around my own transliteration engine, also unreleased) ✅
• I wanted a typing practice tool -> I built the Shaw Type web app, hosted on this website ✅

The two tools I found were missing from the arsenal were a dictionary and a spell checker. Well, on Sunday morning I built Shaw-Spell, a native macOS dictionary and spell checker. Drum roll, please…:

I have been road testing it and tweaking it since then, but so far the experience been fantastic, and once I have it in a place I am comfortable with, I will release it to the world, probably both as a downloadable DMG installer and in source form on GitHub¹.

It will also come as no surprise that I did this with Claude Code. I have already expressed my amazement at the tool’s abilities, so I’ll ease off on waxing lyrically in this post. What I will point out, though is that

1. Claude does best in green field project situations. I kid you not: Shaw-Spell was built from scratch in less than two hours. Most of that time was probably me testing and typing out prompts, if we’re honest.
2. I am getting better at using the tool, and I suspect that Claude is, in its own way, getting more used to me. I know how to give it clear requirements in the way that produce the best results, and I have compiled some really good background instructions for the tool – project-specific and user-specific do’s and don’ts that the user can prime the tool with.

Anyway! Let me tell you about the tools. The project actually creates six dictionaries:

• 2 x English-Shavian (GB and US versions)
• 2 x Shavian-English (GB and US versions)
• 2 x Shavian-Shavian (GB and US versions)

All six dictionaries contain word definitions, IPA pronunciations, lemma (=word root) information. They were built by merging the Readlex dictionary with Open English WordNet 2024. For the Shavian transliterations of the definitions, I used my own Shave transliteration tool. The differences between the US and GB versions are subtle – mainly involving preferring the chosen dialect’s versions over the ‘foreign’ ones, but still including information about the alternative spellings and pronounciations.

The spell-checker is a native NSSpellServerDelegate, backed by a Hunspell dictionary. The dictionaries come in two flavours: General American English and General British English (well, more like Received Pronunciation, I guess). They were generated using the Readlex spelling variation definitions, which helpfully encode which dialect the spelling variation is from. (I had to resort to heuristics to figure out roman alphabet spelling variations.)

MacOS system integration is seamless! Right-click a word, and it gives you possible spelling variations (in editors) and the possibility to look up the definition or transliteration without even opening the Dictionary app. Useful for when you are reading a blog that’s only available in Shavian, or don’t recognize a word in your ebook (actually my number one use-case!)

The spell-checker works just the way the inbuilt one does. All you do, is choose ‘British English (Shaw-Dict)’ or ‘U.S. English (Shaw-Dict)’² as your language, and you’ll be seamlessly able to spellcheck mixed Roman and Shavian alphabet English prose.

I look forward to releasing Shaw-Spell to the world at large! Or rather: to the subset of Shavian users who are on MacOS… If you want Windows or Linux versions of these dictionaries, I will not be able to help you much³. I selfishly built the tools for my own use. Same deal with Android and iOS, though I do hope I’ll find a way of getting some of this functionality on iOS soon.

As mentioned, I will be looking to release this on Github and to host a dmg binary for download here as soon as I can. If you are dying to get your hands on this and become a beta-tester, drop me a note here or on Reddit, and I’ll share an installer with you.

Footnotes

1. And maybe even on the App Store one day. ↩︎
2. I’d actually love to just call them ‘British English (Readlex)’ and ‘American English (Readlex)’. I’ll hold off until I get permission from Mr. Gallaher for that one. ↩︎
3. It might be possible to reuse the Hunspell dictionaries the projects build in Linux – I know of at least a couple of Unix tools that should work with them. ↩︎