How would I find common misspellings of a given word using aspell or another tool

Question

For a given word I'd like to find the n closest misspellings. I was wondering if an open source spell checker like aspell would be useful in that context unless you have other suggestions.

For example: 'health'

would give me: ealth, halth, heallth, healf, ...

Answer 1

http://www.norvig.com/spell-correct.html

Answer 2

Spelling correction tools take misspelled words and offer possible correctly spelled alternatives. You seem to want to go in the other direction.

Going from a correctly spelled word to a set of possible misspellings could probably be performed by applying a set of mutation heuristics to common words. These heuristics might do things like:

• randomly adding or removing single characters
• randomly apply transpositions of pairs of characters
• changing characters to other characters based on keyboard layouts
• application of common "point" misspellings; e.g. transposing "ie" to "ei", doubling or undoubling "l"s.

Going from a correctly spelled word to a set of common misspellings is really hard. Probably the only reliable way to do this would be to instrument a spelling checker package used by a large community of users, record the actual spelling corrections made using the spelling checker, and aggregate the results. That is probably (!) beyond the scope of your project.