Online spellchecking is commonly regarded as an auxiliary way of performing spellchecking. However, it offers a unique opportunity to constantly improve spellchecker linguistic functionality through interaction with the community of spellchecker users. Such a possibility is crucial for spellchecking in non‐central and under‐resourced languages, in order to overcome gaps in NLP tools between them and central languages. The paper describes Hascheck, a Croatian online spellchecker able to learn words from texts it receives. It started as the first Croatian spellchecker, hence as a basic NLP tool for an under‐resourced language, but due to its learning ability it demonstrates linguistic functionality comparable to that of conventional central‐language spellcheckers. Based on these experiences we also discuss the future of online spellchecking in the context of global NLP tasks. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.