Inventor of original “spell check” program dies at 85
Henry Kučera, born Jindřich Kučera, was a Czech linguist and pioneer in corpus linguistics and linguistic software and the inventor of the original “spell check” software program. He died peacefully at the Philip Hulitar Hospice Center in Providence, RI, on February 20, 2010.
Born on February 15, 1925, in the former Czechoslovakia in the town of Trebarov, Kučera eventually went to Prague to study philosophy and linguistics at Charles University. However, the Communist rise to power forced him to leave in April of 1948 when it became clear that his political writings and activities placed him at risk of detention by the authorities. He first traveled to Germany where he worked for Czech refugee organizations assisting in relocation programs under the supervision of the US Counter Intelligence Corps. In 1949 he received a scholarship offer to Harvard University and immigrated to the United States.
After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1952, where he studied under renowned linguist Roman Jakobson, he first taught at the University of Florida at Gainesville and then returned to Harvard in 1954 as a research fellow. In 1955 he received an appointment at Brown University where he spent the rest of his teaching career. He was promoted to full Professor in 1965. He received a Chair in 1983 and retired in 1990 (with full honors and the publication of a Festschrift) as the Fred M. Seed Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences.
While at Brown he became interested in the computational analysis of human language, though at the time there were scarcely any tools for this type of research. Famous for his sense of humor, he often joked that he traded lessons in Russian for lessons on the early mainframe computer systems at Brown. His interest in the intersection between mathematics and linguistics, aided by computer processing capabilities, was to become the foundation of his life’s work and ultimately led to ten U.S. and four Canadian patents.
In 1963-1964, Kučera collaborated with W. Nelson Francis to create the Brown Corpus of Standard American English, generally known as the Brown Corpus. This was a carefully compiled selection of current American English as published during the year 1961 in nearly 1000 sources on a wide variety of subjects. The Brown Corpus has been very widely used in computational linguistics, and was for many years among the most-cited resource in the field. From this work, Kučera and Francis then derived their classic work, Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967), followed by Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar (1982).
In the early 1960’s, Kučera was asked by Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin to supply a million word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary. This groundbreaking dictionary, which first appeared in 1969, was the first to be compiled using corpus linguistics for word frequency and other information.
In 1981, Kučera founded what became Language Systems Software Incorporated and wrote one of the first spell checkers (developed in PL/I for VAX machines) at the behest of Digital Equipment Corporation. Further development resulted in "International Correct Spell" a spell check program used on word processing systems such as Word Star and Microsoft Word. Kučera later oversaw the development of Houghton-Mifflin’s Correct Text grammar checker.
In addition to his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University (where he graduated Summa Cum Laude), Kučera held a doctorate from Charles University in Prague (restored after the "Velvet Revolution" ended Communist rule in Czechoslovakia). He also received honorary degrees from Pembroke College in Providence, RI, Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA, and Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He was a member of the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa.
Kučera was a longtime supporter of Czech causes and underground literary and political publications in Czechoslovakia. He was also a proud supporter of the Hodonin Sea Lions, a Czech regional baseball team. He was also a member of the Providence Art Club, The Review Club, The Rhode Island Shakespearian Society, The Agawam Hunt Club, and the Brown University Faculty Club. In the small town of Freedom, NH, where for many years Kučera and his family summered, he was a proud member of the Loon Lake Yacht Club, where he held the distinct honor of placing last in each and every one of the annual regattas he entered with his legendary sailboat, the Skate.
His wife, Jacqueline Marie Fortin Kučera, whom in married in 1951, and a son, John Kučera, predeceased him. He is survived by two sons, Tomaš Kučera and Edward Kučera, as well as three grand children: Maia Kučera, Calvin Kučera, and Wilson Kučera,
At his request there will be a private service for family only in Providence, RI. In lieu of flowers please make a donation in his name to the Freedom Public Library (Box 159, Freedom, NH, 03836) and/or to the Philip Hulitar Hospice Center (1085 North Main Street, Providence, RI, 02904 or online @ WWW.HHCRI.NET).