Marking correctly spelled words as misspelled
Sometimes you would like Word to call attention to a word that you frequently type when you intend to type a different, similar word. For example, suppose you often type “abut” when you mean “about.” “Abut” is an actual word, so it isn’t misspelled, but chances are that in most cases it’s a typo. You could add “abut > about” as an AutoCorrect entry, but there may be times when you would actually have a use for the word “abut,” so you don’t want to burn your bridges—just make sure that you have some warning that you may have used the wrong word. You can accomplish this by adding the word to an “exclusion dictionary.” This is also an effective way to deal with variant spellings that, while they may be generally accepted as correct, you prefer not to use. If you have Word 2007 or above, you will probably find you have less need for an exclusion dictionary, as the contextual spelling checker in that version will handle many of the “errors” that you would have added to an exclusion dictionary in previous versions.
Too much spell checking
Everything marked as misspelled
This should be an easy one to troubleshoot: clearly the language of the text doesn’t match the language of the proofing tools. If you’re typing in French and spell-checking in English, there may be a few words that will overlap, but for the most part you’ll have “misspellings.” Press Ctrl+A to select the entire document; then, in the Tools | Language | Set Language dialog (Review | Proofing | Set Language in Word 2007; Review | Language | Language | Set Proofing Language in Word 2010), select the correct language if proofing tools are available. If you don’t have proofing tools for the language installed, you canhide the spelling errors.
Correct words marked as misspelled
There are at least four possible reasons for a word to be marked as a misspelling even though you think (or know) it is spelled correctly:
It’s not in the lexicon.If it’s not in the list Word compares words to, it will be marked as misspelled; if it’s a word you use frequently, you can add it to your custom dictionary.
It’s formatted as the wrong language. If you type “civilisation” (a perfectly correct U.K. English spelling) but the language applied to the word is U.S. English, it will be marked as incorrect. Select the text and apply the correct language.
The word has been placed in an exclusion dictionary.
The word contains nonstandard characters. If the word is a contraction such as can’t or won’t, this is a likely possibility. Text imported from WordPerfect often uses characters from the WP Typographic Symbols font for apostrophes, quotation marks, dashes, and so on. If you don’t have the font installed, you’ll see inappropriate characters from your text font instead. If you do have the font installed, you’ll see what appears to be a correctly spelled word, but, because the apostrophe is a symbol Word doesn’t recognize, it doesn’t recognize the word. The error can be corrected by substituting an apostrophe from the text font. You’ll also have this problem if you use AutoCorrect to replace the combinations ff, fi, and fl with the “ligature” characters that appear in some fonts. These can improve the appearance of typeset pages but will cause Word to mark words as misspelled.
Hiding spelling errors
There are times when you don’t want to see spelling errors in your document, or you don’t want others to see them. There are several approaches to this problem, with varying effect on other documents and systems. The options can be summarized as follows:
Option 1: Disable “Check spelling as you type.” | Option 2: Enable “Hide spelling errors in this document.” | Option 3: Format the text as “Do not check spelling or grammar.” |
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Does this affect all my documents? | Yes | No | No |
Will I see wavy underlines? | No | No | No |
Will others see wavy underlines? | Probably; depends on local setting | No | No |
Will I or others be able to check spelling explicitly? | Yes | Yes | No |
Option 1: Disable “Check spelling as you type.” If you clear the check box for “Check spelling as you type” in the Spelling & Grammar or Proofing Options, spelling errors will not be marked in any document on your machine, but you will still be able to run the spelling checker explicitly (using F7 or Tools | Spelling and Grammar or, in Word 2007 and above, Review | Proofing | Spelling & Grammar) whenever you want to. If you send the document to someone else who does have “Check spelling as you type” enabled, spelling errors will be marked on the recipient’s machine. This option is best when you don’t want to be distracted by the underlines or when your system does not run efficiently when “Check spelling as you type” is enabled.
Option 2: Enable “Hide spelling errors in this document.” If you check the box for “Hide spelling errors in this document,” only the present document is affected, and spelling errors will be hidden on any machine on which it is opened, regardless of the Spelling & Grammar Options settings. You can still run the spelling checker explicitly to check spelling, but recipients will not see any words marked as misspelled. This is a good option when a document contains many proper names or technical terms because, even if you add a “misspelled” word to your custom dictionary, unless it is in the recipient’s custom dictionary as well, the word will be marked as misspelled on the recipient’s machine.
Option 3: Format the text as “Do not check spelling or grammar.” If you select all the text, go to the Language dialog, and check the box for “Do not check spelling or grammar,” spelling errors will not be marked even if you have “Check spelling as you type” enabled, and you will not be able to check spelling by running the spelling checker explicitly. This setting affects only the present document, and it applies even on another machine. As explained in the next section, this option can be used selectively.
Exempting specific text from spell checking
Sometimes you will have a document in which certain kinds of text will always be “misspelled.” Even if you have exempted words in UPPERCASE, words with numbers, and Internet and file addresses (see Figure 2), there will still be text that the spelling checker will mark because it is in another language (for which you don’t have proofing tools) or because it is not a real language (programming code, for example, or equations that don’t contain numbers). This is an issue, for example, for an author writing a book about programming who must include code snippets. Or the issue may be just a lot of unusual names.
The solution to this problem is to format the text as “Do not check spelling or grammar.” Remember that we said that the language applied to text (and this includes the “(no proofing)” language) is a character format. It can be applied to a unit as small as a single letter, so it can certainly be applied to specific words or paragraphs.
The easiest way to apply this formatting is toapply a style that is formatted as “Do not check spelling or grammar.” If the text of this type will be complete paragraphs, this can be a paragraph style; if the text will be included in paragraphs of ordinary text, a character style can be used. To add the “Do not check spelling or grammar” property to an existing paragraph style (such as Plain Text, often used for code snippets), in the Modify Style dialog, click Format | Language and check the box for “Do not check spelling or grammar.”
Figure 8. The Modify Style dialog box
Often you will want to create a 'no proofing' character style to apply to selected text. Such a style should be based on “Default Paragraph Font so that you can apply it to any style of text without changing the font formatting.
Figure 9. The Create New Style from Formatting dialog to create a character style
Important Note: Since you are basing your style on Default Paragraph Font, you would expect the resulting style description to be 'Default Paragraph Font + Do not check spelling or grammar.' If you try this, however, you will find that it does not work. Ironically, even though what you want your style to do is suppress use of the proofing tools, you have to explicitly tell Word what language's proofing tools you do not want to use! This means that you must select a language in the Language dialog before 'Do not check...' will become active. The result will be a style defined as, say, 'Default Paragraph Font + Do not check spelling or grammar, English (U.S.).'
Helpful Tip: When you tell Word not to check the spelling or grammar of selected text, you exempt it from all the proofing tools, including the hyphenation file. If you have enabled automatic hyphenation in a document and want to prevent certain words from being hyphenated, you can do it by formatting them as “Do not check spelling or grammar' (using a character style as described above).
Problems with the custom dictionary
Failure to recognize variant forms
Word’s built-in proofing tools have the ability to recognize all tense forms of an included verb, plurals and possessives of nouns, and any combination of caps and lowercase. Custom dictionaries don’t have this ability. If you add a noun all in lowercase, Word will recognize it when capitalized, but if you capitalize it in the custom dictionary, it will not be recognized when lowercased. Nor will it be recognized if you make it plural or possessive; you must add all these variant forms individually.
Word added in error
To remove a word from a custom dictionary, open the Custom Dictionaries dialog, select the appropriate dictionary, and click Modify. Select the incorrect word, click Delete, then click OK.
Word not added
If you right-click on a “misspelled” word and choose Add to Dictionary and get the error message, “The custom dictionary is full. The word was not added,” this can indicate that the dictionary is corrupt or the spelling checker files are damaged; seethis Microsoft Knowledge Base article. In no case does the message actually mean that the custom dictionary is full—at least not in recent versions of Word (there is a maximum size of 64 KB, but it's unlikely you'll reach that, though you might experience performance issues if the dictionary becomes very large).
If, however, the Add to Dictionary command is unavailable (dimmed on the shortcut menu), this indicates that the language of the default dictionary differs from the language applied to the word you’re trying to add. By default, Custom.dic is set to All Languages; if you change it to, say, French, you will not be able to add an English word. This error might easily arise if you had created an additional custom dictionary for specific terms, set the language to something other than All Languages, set it as the default temporarily, and forgotten to reselect Custom.dic as the default.
Note: It has also been reported that sometimes the Custom.dic file inexplicably gets flagged as Read-only. The solution to that problem is to select the file in Windows Explorer, right-click, choose Properties, and clear the check box for 'Read-only.'
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*Astute readers will recognize the allusion to this passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass:
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
This article copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2019 by Suzanne S. Barnhill. I am grateful to Stefanie Schiller, Thierry Fontenelle, and Lisa Decrozant of Microsoft's Natural Language Group, whose comments helped me make this article more accurate. Any errors that remain are my own. Thanks also to Word MVP Doug Robbins for his sleuthing to discover the problem discussed under “Misspelled words skipped.”