# What changed in natural

> 10 changes in natural 3 to 8 from its official release notes, upgrade guides and advisories: 5 breaking. Each one cited. Sources checked 2026-11-13. HTML: https://unstale.sh/npm/natural/

To see which of these apply to a repository, run `npx @unstale/cli init` in it.

## natural 8

### Breaking changes

- Restricts silent S to ISL and YSL. (8.2.3) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/v8.2.3)
- SoundEx initial characters are now treated literally. (8.2.2) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/v8.2.2)

### Behavior and default changes

- Storage plugins are lazy-loaded to avoid side effects on import. (8.1.2) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/v8.1.2)

### Fixes and other changes

- Fixes JaroWinklerDistance for single-character strings that differ in case. (8.2.6) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/v8.2.6)
- TfIdf no longer looks up terms on document prototypes and caches terms. (8.2.5) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/v8.2.5)
- Fixes the wrong transposition calculation in unrestricted damerau-levenshtein. (8.2.1) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/v8.2.1)

## natural 6

### Tooling

- TypeScript types were added to enable use of the library in TypeScript projects. (6.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/6.0.0)

## natural 4

### Breaking changes

- Importing the Japanese stemmer now returns a newly created object. (4.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/4.0.0)

## natural 3

### Breaking changes

- Some methods in the natural API were renamed to camel case, so developers may need to update calls to those methods. (3.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/3.0.0)
- Methods attached to native types have been removed, including attach from stemmers and tokenizers. (3.0.0) — [release notes](https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural/releases/tag/3.0.0)