Abstract: An electronic word building machine including a keyboard to input a user determined set of letters, a set of words in memory, a comparison program to compare the input set of letters with the set of words in memory to provide a set of matching words from the set of words in memory, the set of matching words including words which consist only of a subset of letters from the input set of letters, a ranking program to provide a predetermined score for each of the words in the set of matching words, and a display to display on the machine each of the words in the sequence of the value of the score together with the score value of the word being displayed.

Abstract: A spelling corrector develops a phonetic correction candidate list and a typographic correction candidate list. These lists are merged using similarity values that measure the degree of similarity between the query (input) word and each word on the candidate lists. The similarity values include one based on phonetic comparison one based on typographic (ASCII, for example) comparison, one based on a vowel and consonant typographic pattern comparison and one based on a consonant phonetic comparison.

Abstract: An electronic spelling correcting machine compares input term against a list of terms in memory and validates spelling and provides a set of terms which may correspond to the input term if the input term is incorrect. The validated term or suggested term is provided with a locating indicia that permits the user to go to the page in a book where definition of the meaning of the word may be found. Various word games are incorporated. A user determined list may be substituted for the main list of terms in order to enable the user to practice word games and thus learn the words based on a selected list of terms of significance to the user. For purposes of game playing, the words incorrectly used from said user list are biased in such a fashion that they are picked in a quasi-random fashion so that the words played incorrectly are selected with greater frequency than the words played correctly.

Abstract: Improvements in a hand-held spelling machine increase the speed with which a query word is compared against the words in memory. One technique is to provide a look up table to encode all character sets of one or two letters into a coded string. Where the set of letters is three or more characters, a previously known algorithm is employed. Search of the memory is limited to only a few main branches of the tree. The limitation is a function of the first query word letter. The time it takes to calculate the similarity function is saved in two circumstances. When a similarity function is calculated at a particular level of the tree and found to be great enough so that there is no prune of the tree, then that decision not to prune is carried forward for other tree branches having the same letters prior to the level involved.

Abstract: A hand held electronic spelling dictionary to facilitate the selection of a random word. A random word may be selected for purposes of playing games. An input word size is selected by the user through a keyboard. A random number generator generates a random number for each position in the word selected. The random number selects a letter from a predetermined letter table which table has a distribution of letters approximately equal to the frequency with which letters occur in the English language. The result is a selected letter sequence having a size equal to the input size from the keyboard. This is treated as an input word which is alphabetically traversed against the memory to find valid words of equal size. To minimize biasing the valid words selected, a second random number generator generates a second random number N to select as the output word, the Nth valid word found on an alphabetical traverse.