spellingI

spellingI is a proposed notation in the fields of computational linguistics and digital text processing. It aims to provide a machine-readable representation of orthographic spellings and their variants across languages. The term is not widely standardized and appears mainly in early-stage research and experimental projects.

A spellingI record describes a single spelling form with associated metadata. Core components include the orthographic form, language tag, script, and region, as well as optional fields for phoneme sequence, diacritics, capitalization, and hyphenation. The model is designed to keep the surface spelling separate from its linguistic analysis, enabling consistent exchange between tools such as spell checkers, OCR systems, and lexicons.

For example, English has American color and British colour. A spellingI entry for the two forms would tag language as English, region as US or GB, and may link both forms to a shared lemma and pronunciation, while noting their status as orthographic variants.

Origins and status: The term spellingI appears in limited discussions and is not part of a formal standard. Implementations are experimental, and the exact schema varies among projects.

Applications: Potential uses include improving cross-language spell-checking, aligning dictionaries, supporting OCR post-correction, and helping language-learning tools present consistent spellings while acknowledging regional variants.

Relation to related concepts: spellingI relates to orthography encoding, grapheme–phoneme mapping, and language metadata. It may be realized in JSON, XML, or RDF-based formats as part of multilingual linguistic data exchange.