How to spell-check an individual word

[Killer42]

Hi all.

I've done some searching here and the round the web in regard to spell-checking. There are plenty of ways to check a document, or editors (eg. WPF Rich Text box) with checking built in.

But what I have is simply a chunk of characters picked out of a data stream. I need to check whether it's actually a word, before passing it along. So I'm looking for a quick way my code can spell-check an individual word and get back a "good" or "bad" response, without involving a user interface.

Oh, this is using VB 2012, and only just getting started with it. (Been using VB6 for ages.)

I expect I could create a temporary Word document and check that, or place it in a RTF box or something. Just wondering what's easiest. Performance is likely to be an issue, as well. I read about one person here who found it took 30 minutes for Word to check a small document, so that's the sort of pitfall I hope to avoid.

[Rabbit]

Will you be able to access a database? You could download one of those free word lists and then run a query against the list in a database.

[Killer42]

Would prefer not to have to involve a database. It seems like overkill.