Hi HN. Euspell is a conservastive respelling of English and all the software needed to implement it. The link above converts the text you paste, in your browser. Other ways to try it out are the browser extensions and EPUB/PDF readers.

Previous spelling reforms have failed for two reasons: they asked people to apply rules by hand or remember a large set of new spellings, and they couldn't handle homographs: "read" is reed or red, "records" is a noun or a verb, "wound" is an injury or a past tense - writing in pure phonetics will actually create hundreds of homographs. Euspell approaches spelling reform differently, with the goal of aiding reading and comprehension.

- A lexicon with 205505 entries, each with CLAWS7 part-of-speech tags. Of these, 164067 (80%) are left unchanged. No diacritics are used. Proper nouns are untouched. American spelling is the base, in the line of Webster's reforms. - 5920 entries are ambiguous and need context. The noun/verb -s split (records/recordz) is a linear SVM: 93.2% on held-out text. The hand-written rule it replaced scored 75.9%. The full evaluation is at https://github.com/ossiak/euspell/blob/main/docs/paper-evalu... - Semantic splits (e.g. bow, tear, lead) are hand-written rules and less accurate: "read" gets about four in five right on its test set. - Runs locally in a browser extension (Chrome/Firefox/Safari, including PDFs), MS Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs, and a standalone EPUB/PDF reader for Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS. - Code is GPL-3.0, lexicon is CC BY-SA 4.0: https://github.com/ossiak/euspell. White paper: https://euspell.org/paper

The changes can be toggled on and off: Euspell changes what you read, not the source text. AI tools (Claude) helped with the software, the site and the videos; the reform and the lexicon are mine. There is also a 14-part video series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfCd5hTV7IWg

Most useful feedback: sentences where it picks the wrong spelling.

Show HN: Euspell – Spelling reform: an enginnering approach