14 DAY TRIAL // Having launched its own breed of open source browser in late 2008, Google is already hard at work cooking version 2.0, as it has already signed off and made Chrome 1.0 available to the general public. Moving onward with the development of Chrome, the Mountain View search giant is taking a variety of aspects of the browser to the next level, including the spell check dictionary. In this context, one of the terms added to Google Chrome 2.0.160.0 is “Obama,” for the current president of the United States.
“The spellchecker built into Chromium can be a big help in keeping your blog, email, documents, and forum postings spelled correctly and easy to read. Chromium integrates the popular open source library Hunspell with WebKit's built-in spellchecking infrastructure to check words and to provide suggestions in 27 different languages,” revealed Brett Wilson and Siddhartha Chattopadhyay, Google Software Engineers.
Wilson and Chattopadhyay indicated that Google, with its massive, some may say even monopolist, reach over the Internet is best positioned to catalyze the addition of new terms to resources such as Hunspell. In this regard, the Google translation team landed a helping hand by identifying collections of words in different languages with a high level of popularity. Google subsequently identified no less than 1,000 words which were not featured in the dictionary. The Mountain View search giant indicated that the linguistic work it had done was available to anyone interested under GPL/LGPL/MPL tri-license agreements.
“The recent dev-channel release of Google Chrome (2.0.160.0) has the additional words we generated for 19 of the languages. Hopefully, you'll see fewer common words marked as misspelled. For example, the English dictionary now includes 'antivirus,' 'anime,' 'screensaver,' and 'webcam,' and commonly used names such as 'BibTeX,' 'Mozilla,' 'Obama,' and 'Wikipedia.' For our scientific users, we even have 'gastroenterology,' 'oligonucleotide,' and 'Saccharomyces',” Wilson and Chattopadhyay added.
Google Chrome 2.0 is available for download here.