A highly accurate Turkish spellchecking dictionary (.aff / .dic) optimized, compressed, and packaged specifically for use in Mozilla Firefox as a browser extension.
This project packages state-of-the-art Turkish dictionary data into a legacy/WebExtension format (.xpi) so it can be directly loaded into Firefox for seamless, native browser spellchecking.
This project is a fork of the excellent work done by the Turkish Data Depository (TDD) group: 👉 Original Repository: tdd-ai/hunspell-tr
We would like to express our gratitude to the original authors and contributors for constructing this dictionary from extensive Turkish text corpora and dictionaries, achieving unparalleled correction accuracy:
- Ali Safaya
- Arda Göktoğan
- Deniz Yuret
- Emirhan Kurtuluş
- Taner Sezer
While the original repository provides raw, high-quality language data, raw Hunspell data is often structurally unoptimized or missing daily web-centric vocabulary required for real-time browser environments. This fork introduces significant updates to the dictionary files to ensure lightweight, fast, and linguistically exhaustive performance inside Mozilla Firefox:
Traditional Turkish spellcheckers frequently ignore or incorrectly strip out words requiring the circumflex accent (incisura / düzeltme işareti). This fork explicitly expands and validates words using â and î characters to prevent false typo alerts and resolve semantic ambiguities:
- Semantic Disambiguation: Properly distinguishes homographs like hala (aunt) vs. hâlâ (still), or kar (snow) vs. kâr (profit) by appending correct suffix flags directly onto the accented word forms.
- Loanword Integration: Expanded coverage for words of Arabic and Persian origin containing long vowels or palatalized consonants (e.g., millî, resmî, kâğıt, tezgâh), pairing them with appropriate vowel harmony rules in the
.afflogic.
To prevent the annoying red squiggly lines on modern web pages, the .dic file has been populated with missing vocabulary absent from older open-source corpora:
- Contemporary & Digital Terms: Added missing terminology widely used in modern communication, tech, and everyday media.
- Proper Nouns & Locales: Expanded the dataset with frequently omitted geopolitical names, modern proper nouns, and localized terminology.
- Derivational Forms: Fixed missing lexical gaps where base word roots existed but their valid derived forms (via suffixes like -ci, -lik, or -laş) were structurally blocked or omitted.
- Affix Rule Adjustments: Modified the affix (
.aff) rules governing morphotactics to eliminate false-negative flags common in compound words. - Plural Validation: Fixed a specific edge case involving Turkish plural suffixes (
-lar/-ler) overlapping with vowel harmony sequences (especially after soft consonants indicated byâorî), ensuring variations are no longer incorrectly flagged.
- File Size Reduction: Stripped redundant word stems, duplicated flag combinations, and obsolete word definitions. This drastically reduces memory overhead when Firefox loads the dictionary into RAM.
- Lookup Performance: Reordered the affix mapping flags to prioritize the most frequently used Turkish suffixes (e.g., case markings, possessives). This optimization accelerates real-time "as-you-type" spellchecking, preventing browser lagging or typing stutters.
When tested against the trspell-10 benchmark dataset, this TDD-based dictionary model demonstrates significantly higher correction accuracy compared to older alternatives:
| Spell Checker | Error Detection Precision | Error Detection Recall | Error Detection F1-Score | Correction Accuracy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| zemberek-python | 99.94% | 94.21% | 96.99% | 93.05% |
| hunspell-tr (hrzafer) | 99.63% | 99.36% | 99.50% | 79.61% |
| TDD hunspell-tr (This Base) | 99.90% | 97.30% | 98.58% | 94.67% |
Because this is optimized specifically as a Firefox extension, you can load it directly into your browser:
- Open Mozilla Firefox.
- Type
about:debuggingin the URL address bar and press Enter. - Click on "This Firefox" in the left sidebar.
- Click the "Load Temporary Add-on..." button.
- Select the
manifest.jsonfile (or the compiled.xpifile) from this repository. - Right-click in any text field on the web, go to Languages, and select Turkish to begin using it.
The underlying dictionary data and source files are licensed under the MPL-2.0 (Mozilla Public License 2.0). See the LICENSE file for more details.