The spell checking that works perfectly on Google Chrome, OpenOffice and Mozilla Firefox is available to you and PHP as well – all thanks to open source software!

The above mentioned apps use the “Hunspell” library, which can be used directly under PHP without the usage of ugly (and unsecure) exec/system calls.

The following steps I did on my OSX MPB (10.10 / Yosemite) but they will be very similar on any Linux/Unix system (well, might even be easier on Ubuntu or Debian via their package system).
Just make sure you at least use libenchant 1.5

Compile and Install hunspell

$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/hunspell/hunspell-1.3.3.tar.gz
$ tar xvfz hunspell-1.3.3.tar.gz
$ cd hunspell-1.3.3
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Compile and Install libenchant

$ wget http://www.abisource.com/downloads/enchant/1.6.0/enchant-1.6.0.tar.gz
$ tar xvfz enchant-1.6.0.tar.gz
$ cd enchant-1.6.0
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Compile and Install php-enchant (in this case as shared lib)

(there is currently a bug in the configure file that will not recognize your libenchant version and thus not giving you some of the newer features, patch is here)

$ cd php-5.5.14/ext/enchant/
$ phpize
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Something something extension=enchant.so in your php.ini… Dictionaries

$ cd Dicts
$ sudo wget https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/deps/hunspell_dictionaries/+archive/master.tar.gz
$ sudo tar xvfz master.tar.gz