---
id: pyenchant
version: "3.3.0"
license: LGPL
license_treatment: copyleft
maintenance: active
---

# pyenchant — Python bindings for the Enchant spellchecking system

License: copyleft · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 4.0M/mo

## What it is and what it does

PyEnchant is a Python wrapper around the Enchant spellchecking library, which has been in active development since 2006. It lets you check spelling and get correction suggestions for words, supporting multiple languages and multiple underlying spellchecking engines. The package itself is lightweight with no Python runtime dependencies—it uses ctypes to call the native Enchant library.

The main gotcha is that PyEnchant is not self-contained: installing it via pip does not automatically provide the Enchant library itself. You must install Enchant separately on your system before PyEnchant can work. Once Enchant is present, PyEnchant gives you a straightforward Python API to create dictionary objects, check words, and retrieve suggestions.

Use it for:

- Build a spell-checker for user-submitted text in a web application or content management system.
- Validate spelling in bulk text processing pipelines before publishing or archiving documents.
- Implement multilingual spell-checking in desktop or CLI tools that need to support many languages.
- Add spell-check suggestions to a text editor or IDE plugin.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

PyEnchant provides Python bindings to the Enchant spellchecking library, enabling spell-checking and correction suggestions across multiple languages and dictionary backends.

Yes, if you already have Enchant installed on your system or are willing to install it separately. PyEnchant is stable, actively maintained, has no Python dependencies, and is widely used. The main friction is the external system dependency—plan for that upfront. No known security vulnerabilities.

## Install

pip install pyenchant
uv add pyenchant
poetry add pyenchant

## Installing pyenchant

Before you install: Low install friction with a pure-wheel distribution. Active maintenance with a recent commit on 2026-06-04. However, the documentation explicitly warns that PyEnchant will not work out of the box after installation—the underlying Enchant library must be installed separately on the system.

License in practice: Licensed under LGPL (copyleft). This means any modifications to PyEnchant itself must be released under compatible terms, though applications using it as a library face fewer restrictions.

Quickstart:

pip install pyenchant

import pyenchant
# Create a dictionary and check spelling
checker = pyenchant.Dict("en_US")
print(checker.check("word"))
print(checker.suggest("misspeled"))

The Enchant spellchecking library must be installed on the system separately; PyEnchant is only the Python binding and will not function without it.

Verify before relying:

- Which system package managers and versions of Enchant are officially supported or tested.
- Whether all popular spellchecking backends (ispell, aspell, MySpell) are equally well-supported through Enchant on modern systems.
- Performance characteristics for large-scale spell-checking workloads.

## Package facts

- License: LGPL (copyleft)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 4.0M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

spell check python, spellchecker library, enchant bindings, python spelling correction, multilingual spell checking, spell-checking, multilingual

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