LanguageTool

Style and Grammar Checker
Screenshot of LanguageTool

LanguageTool is an Open Source style and grammar proofreading software for English, French, German, Polish, Dutch, Romanian, and a lot of other languages. You can think of LanguageTool as a software to detect errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect, e.g. mixing up there/their, no/now etc. It can also detect some grammar mistakes. It does not include spell checking.

LanguageTool will find errors for which a rule is defined in its language-specific configuration files. Rules for detecting more complicated errors can be written in Java.

Try it online

Use LanguageTool in LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org, as a stand-alone application, or embedded in other applications or try it out here:

Language:

Try LanguageTool without installation, using Java WebStart. Requires Java 6 or later:
Start LanguageTool (29 MB)

Download

  • Requires Java 6 or later - we recommend Java 6 for now, as many users have performance problems when using LanguageTool with Java 7
  • Use Tools -> Extension Manager -> Add... in LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org to install it or see other ways to use LanguageTool.
  • Restart OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice after installation of this extension.
  • If you are using LibreOffice 3.5 and you want to check English texts: Use Options -> Language Settings -> Writing Aids -> Edit... to disable LightProof and enable LanguageTool for English
  • Having problems? Please see the list of common problems.
  • Please report bugs in our forum or in the Sourceforge bug tracker.

Untested daily builds of the current development version are available at the snapshot directory (CHANGES.txt). Old releases are still available in the download directory.

News

2012-03-25: Released LanguageTool 1.7. Changes include:

  • Rule updates for several languages (French, English, Breton, Russian, Esperanto, German)
  • Several small bug fixes
  • For a detailed list of changes, see the Changelog

2012-02-04: See our new language-specific pages for German, Russian, and Esperanto

2011-12-31: Released LanguageTool 1.6. Changes include:

  • Rule updates for several languages (Chinese, French, Breton, and others)
  • Renamed the Java packages from de.danielnaber.languagetool.* to org.languagetool.*
  • For a more detailed list of changes, see the Changelog

2011-11-18: We now offer Wikicheck, a new service to check Wikipedia pages with LanguageTool

Follow us on twitter (also via RSS) for the latest news. See the news archive for old news.

License & Source Code

LanguageTool is freely available under the LGPL. The source is available at Sourceforge via SVN. The contents of this homepage is available under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Page last modified: 2012-05-16