Hi shoeblade,

1.- the easier way (on the long term, as it would make it easy to add more languages by just writting the lexicon rules of that language) would be to have a lexicon class that can evaluate if the word follows the syntactical and grammatical rules for the word (that way you can test any word against it) but I'm afraid I don't know if there is any type of lexicon for Java (should be, though).

2- other approach would be to check against a list of allowed words, buut in these one you would need to have all the words. (load them from a text file, xml, etc).

3- if you can connect to the Internet when running your sketc, you could try Google define or  any other word definition site, to assure that word exists.

hope this helps.