Check spelling in TinyMCE

TinyMCE provides several options to bring spell checking capabilities to your users.

Browser-based spell checking

Assign the browser_spellcheck configuration option the value of true to utilize the browser’s native spell check functionality. Disabling the contextmenu option may be required depending on the right-click or context usability requirement.

tinymce.init({
  selector: 'textarea',  // change this value according to your HTML
  browser_spellcheck: true,
  contextmenu: false
});

Note: When the TinyMCE context menu is enabled, users can still access the browser context menu, including the browser spellchecker, using the Ctrl+Right click shortcut. However if the contextmenu_never_use_native option is enabled, holding the Ctrl key will have no effect.

PHP Spellchecker component

Important: The free TinyMCE Spell Checker plugin (spellchecker) was deprecated with the release of TinyMCE 5.4. For details, see the free TinyMCE Spell Checker plugin deprecation notice. The free Spell Checker plugin will be removed in TinyMCE 6.0.

You can also use TinyMCE’s PHP Spellchecker component, that you can download here. To view the complete changelog history, view this txt file. The TinyMCE’s PHP Spellchecker component requires a little more work than the browser-based option, being a server-side script.

This plugin enables Enchant or PSpell on the server to spell check content within the TinyMCE editor.

Installation steps for the default Enchant engine

1. Enable Enchant in PHP.
2. Download the TinyMCE Spellchecker for PHP package. (Direct download).
3. Unpack the package in the /path/to/tinymce/plugins/spellchecker directory.
4. Configure TinyMCE to use the spell checker by enabling the spellchecker plugin.
5. Configure the spellchecker_rpc_url to 'spellchecker.php'.
6. Download word lists and place them in the /dicts directory for example “es_ES.dic, es_ES.aff”.

Example: Using the PHP spellchecker

tinymce.init({
  selector: 'textarea',  // change this value according to your HTML
  plugins: 'spellchecker',
  toolbar: 'spellchecker',
  spellchecker_rpc_url: 'spellchecker.php'
});

Review the Spell Checker plugin for advanced configuration options.

TinyMCE Spell Checker Pro plugin

Use the Spell Checker Pro plugin for scalable enterprise-grade spell check as-you-type functionality. Spell Checker Pro requires both a client-side plugin to be configured and a server-side component to be installed and configured.

Review the TinyMCE Premium Features documentation for Spelling. Learn more about TinyMCE Premium Products here.

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Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.