spell checker

not specifically a php question, although i intend to implement it in php. I am currently writting a webmail client in php and have got to the stage where i am thinking about adding special features to it. I am interested in implementing a spell checker and would like to know the best way to go about it. I have looked around online with no real luck. In short, is there a better way to do it than to get php to read the contents of a wordlist into an associative array (eg each word becomes the key of an array), and then test each word with it? The second question is, are there any "spell checker server" programs available in perl or C? If say for instance I wanted to use a 13mb wordlist and i have more than one user at a time, it would make sense to have one process running with it loaded into memory, and then php scripts connect to it as required. It wouldn't be to hard to knock together in perl based upon the above method, but i don't want to start programming something which is already there. Thanks for your help Steven P.S. Remove the nospam part of my email address to reply