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What is natural?

naturalnode/natural — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-06-24

★ 10,873JavaScriptAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5LicenseSetup · easy

In one sentence

Natural is a JavaScript/Node.js library for processing human text, it handles tokenizing sentences, stemming words, measuring text similarity, and working with an English word database, with TypeScript support included.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((natural))
    What it does
      NLP for Node.js
      Text tokenizing
      Word stemming
      Similarity scoring
    Included Data
      WordNet database
      German stemmer
    Tech Stack
      JavaScript
      TypeScript
      Node.js
    Audience
      Web developers
      Data engineers
    License
      MIT
      Princeton WordNet
      BSD stemmer
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filefunction / class

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Tokenize and stem a corpus of customer support tickets to group similar messages together for analysis.

USE CASE 2

Build a search feature that matches user queries to documents even when the exact words differ, using Natural's string-similarity tools.

USE CASE 3

Look up word meanings and relationships in English using the bundled WordNet database to power a vocabulary app.

USE CASE 4

Strip German words down to their root form for a multilingual text-search or categorization feature.

What is it built with?

JavaScriptTypeScriptNode.js

How does it compare?

naturalnode/naturalvuejs/vue-hackernews-2.0clauderic/react-sortable-hoc
Stars10,87310,87310,892
LanguageJavaScriptJavaScriptJavaScript
Setup difficultyeasymoderateeasy
Complexity2/53/52/5
Audiencedeveloperdeveloperdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

Install via npm, no external services or native binaries required.

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, under the MIT license, the bundled WordNet data is under a Princeton University license and the German stemmer under BSD, all permissive.

So what is it?

Natural is a JavaScript library for Node.js that handles natural language processing tasks. Natural language processing is the field of software that works with human text: breaking sentences into words, understanding word roots, comparing how similar two phrases are, and related operations that help programs make sense of written language. The README for this project is brief and points readers to separate documentation hosted on GitHub Pages for the full list of features. What the README does confirm is that the library covers a broad range of natural language tasks, includes WordNet (a large English word database from Princeton University used for understanding word meanings and relationships), and includes a German-language word stemmer, which is a tool that strips words down to their root form. The project supports TypeScript in addition to plain JavaScript, which means developers who prefer typed code can use it without extra workarounds. The code is released under the MIT license, which permits free use in personal and commercial projects. The WordNet data bundled with the library carries a separate Princeton University license, and the German stemmer component uses a BSD license. All three are permissive and allow broad use. This project has been around since at least 2011 and has accumulated nearly 11,000 stars on GitHub, suggesting it has been widely used across the Node.js ecosystem for text-processing tasks.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
How do I install the natural library in Node.js and tokenize a paragraph of text into individual words?
Prompt 2
Show me how to use natural's string distance functions to find the closest match to a user's misspelled search query in a list of product names.
Prompt 3
How do I use the WordNet integration in natural to look up synonyms for a word and build a simple thesaurus feature?
Prompt 4
Walk me through stemming a list of English words with natural's Porter stemmer so I can normalize text before indexing it.
Prompt 5
How do I use natural in a TypeScript project to classify short text messages into categories using a Naive Bayes classifier?

Frequently asked questions

What is natural?

Natural is a JavaScript/Node.js library for processing human text, it handles tokenizing sentences, stemming words, measuring text similarity, and working with an English word database, with TypeScript support included.

What language is natural written in?

Mainly JavaScript. The stack also includes JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js.

What license does natural use?

Use freely for any purpose, including commercial use, under the MIT license, the bundled WordNet data is under a Princeton University license and the German stemmer under BSD, all permissive.

How hard is natural to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.

Who is natural for?

Mainly developer.

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