JSON Web Service to check for common misspellings in popular names, e.g. "Aberaham Lincoln"?

I'm looking for a way to call a web service to check for obvious misspellings in names of culturally significant people:

   Aberaham Lincoln
   Margaret Tatcher
   John Lennin

Ideally a JSON-based service that I coul开发者_如何学Cd make a jQuery.getJSON() call to.

Is there such a thing?

Not aware of such a service, but would seem doable with open source components. For the beef, would need list of names to compare against, then some distance calculation algorithm -- even simple Levenstein algo (which I am sure is available on almost any language) should work -- and that's about it. So; first check that name is not on the list (in-memory hash); and if so, check if distance to one of known names is small (enough), indicate that. Or possible just return list of closest match(es) with score of similarity.