Scott Bouma

Designed an interview coding question for prospective applicants. The question revolves around implementing a straightforward spell checker that detects certain types of misspelled words, such as duplicated letters or swapped vowels.

This C# code is an example solution I developed within a few hours. The program takes a dictionary file and a text file containing potentially misspelled input words. For each input word, the program determines whether it is a valid word, suggests a similar word from the dictionary if possible, or outputs "UNKNOWN" if no suitable match is found.

The clever thing about my solution is the use of a hash map to store the dictionary. This approach ensures O(1) analysis time for any input word, avoiding the need for more time-consuming traversals of the dictionary.

To run the code, two arguments must be specified: a dictionary text file containing one word per line, for which any medium-sized English word dictionary text file will suffice, and another text file with input words that may contain duplicated letters or incorrect vowels.