1. In a process for automatically detecting and correcting misspelled text words, a method for improving the selection from a dictionary memory of the set of correctly spelled target words most nearly equal to the input word without recourse to a character by character positional match comprising the steps of: (a) defining a set of counters for each text character; (b) incrementing said counters to accumulate a count of the respective characters in the input word; (c) decrementing said counters for each character in a target word; (d) calculating an absolute value for the remainders in the set of counters; (e) calculating a threshold value using the combination of the number of characters in the input word and the target word; (f) calculating a match value for the target word using the common characters between the input word and the target word; and (g) selecting each target word whose match value exceeds the calculated threshold.