8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 1/13

Mastering Spell-Check 

Many users become frustrated by Word’s proofing tools, especially the spelling checker. It doesn’trecognize words they know are right, or it insists on recognizing U.S. spellings when they want

U.K. spellings, or they want Word to ignore certain kinds of text that aren’t really words at all.

They become understandably exasperated with Word’s know-it-all attitude. Who’s in charge here,anyway? The question is, who is to be master,* and it is possible to get the upper hand!

Important Note: This article is primarily applicable to the English spelling checker. Proofing

tools for other languages vary considerably.

How Word’s spelling checker works

Solving spell check problems

  Too little spell checking:

•  Nothing is marked as misspelled. 

• Word refuses to check spelling or skips some words. 

• I told Word to ignore some words, but now I want to check them anyway. 

• Word doesn’t mark a word as misspelled, but I’d like it to. 

Too much spell checking:

•  Everything is marked as misspelled. 

• Words are marked as misspelled even though they appear to be spelled correctly. 

• I don’t want to see misspelled words, or I don’t want clients to see misspelled words. 

• I want specific text not to be spell-checked. 

Problems with the custom dictionary:

• Word doesn’t recognize all forms of a word I added to the custom dictionary. 

• I added a word to the custom dictionary by accident, and now I want to remove it. 

• Word refuses to add a word to the custom dictionary. 

How Word checks spellingLet’s start with an explanation of how Word’s spelling checker works. It is not really very

sophisticated. Essentially, Word has a very large (but not infinite) list of words to which itcompares each “word” you type. If it doesn’t find a match, it tells you that the word is misspelled.

In compounding languages such as German or Dutch, Word's lexicon contains possible

components of compound words, and the spelling checker verifies these individual components in

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 2/13

much the same way that the English spelling checker looks at the separate parts of hyphenated

words.

The lists used by the spelling checker are in “lexicons” (files with the .lex extension) identified bylanguage. For example, Mssp3en.lex is the lexicon for most varieties of English; there is a separate

lexicon for Australian English, Mssp3ena.lex. These files are in a proprietary format andcannot be read or edited by users.

The importance of language

The lexicon Word uses depends on what language you have selected for the text. By default, the

English edition of Word comes with proofing tools (spelling and grammar checkers, a thesaurus,and a hyphenation file) for English, French, and Spanish (several flavors of each). Other languages

are included in other editions. If you want to check spelling and grammar in a language not

included with your edition, you must purchase the Office Proofing Tools package for your versionof Office. For Office 2007 and 2010, you can purchase proofing tools in individual languages;

these are available at Office Online.

Figure 1. The Language dialog

The language applied to text is selected in the Tools | Language | Set Language dialog (Review |

Proofing | Set Language in Word 2007 and 2010). In Figure 1, note that you can tell from the list 

in this dialog which languages have proofing tools installed. In this example, you could format

your text as Estonian, but you would not be able to check spelling or grammar because the proofing tools for Estonian are not available.

Important Note: Although the Language dialog lists numerous varieties of “English,” the only

dialects actually supported are Australian, Canadian, U.S., and U.K.; all others will default to one 

of those four, usually U.K. English. This also applies to other languages: for example, there is nodifference between German (Germany) and Germany (Austria); the same lexicon is used for both.

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 3/13

If the language of your text doesn’t match the language of the proofing tools being used, then

obviously you won’t get very good results. A common complaint of British users is that Word

insists on using U.S. English instead of U.K. English, even though they have selected U.K. Englishas the default. There are two issues here:

1. No matter what language you think you have chosen as the default in Word, it may not“stick” unless you have selected the same language as the default in Windows (Control

Panel | Regional Options | Input Locales or Control Panel | Regional and Language

Options | Languages | Details...). For more on this, see “Set the desired language in

Windows.”

2. Language is a character format that travels with text. If you have selected U.K. English asthe language of your document and paste in text formatted as U.S. English, the language at

the insertion point (after the pasted text) will be U.S. English, and that will be the language

of any text you add at that point. One way to avoid this problem is to paste as unformattedtext.

Custom dictionaries

In addition to the built-in “lexicon” in a given language, Word can use user-defined “dictionaries,”

to which you can add words of your choice. The default user or custom dictionary is the

Custom.dic file. When you right-click on a “misspelled” word and choose Add to Dictionary, thisis the file to which it is added. It’s a simple text file that you can edit.

For all practical purposes, you can have as many custom dictionaries as you like (although there is

a maximum number, it is very unlikely that you will exceed it). For example, you might have a

number of specific technical terms that you use only for certain documents. You could create aseparate dictionary for these terms and load it as needed. To create such a new dictionary (Word

2003):

1. Go to Tools | Options | Spelling & Grammar (Office Button | Word Options | Proofing

in Word 2007; File | Options | Proofing in Word 2010).

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 4/13

Figure 2. The Spelling & Grammar Options dialog

2. Click on Custom Dictionaries…

3. In the Custom Dictionaries dialog, click New…

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 5/13

Figure 3. The Custom Dictionaries dialog

4. In the Create Custom Dictionary dialog, choose a name for your dictionary and click 

Save.

Figure 4. The Create Custom Dictionary dialog

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 6/13

5. By default, your new dictionary will be checked in the Custom Dictionaries dialog, which

means that the words in it will be added to those in your lexicon file and Custom.dic when

Word compares a word you type to its lists.6. If you want to be able to add words to your new custom dictionary as you work, select it in

the Custom Dictionaries dialog and click Change Default. This will set your new

dictionary as the default dictionary so that when you right-click on a “misspelled” wordand choose Add to Dictionary, it will be added to this dictionary instead of Custom.dic.

Don’t forget to reset Custom.dic as your default dictionary when you’re working in

ordinary documents.

7. You can also add words to your new custom dictionary all at once. In the Custom

Dictionaries dialog, select your custom dictionary and click Modify. In the ensuing dialog,

type a word in the box at the top and click Add. Repeat as desired. The words will be

added in alphabetical order.

Figure 5. A custom dictionary opened for modification

Some add-in dictionaries, such as dictionaries of medical and legal terms, are available for  purchase. You can add such a dictionary by clicking Add in the Custom Dictionaries dialog,

navigating to its location on your hard drive, selecting it, and clicking OK in the Add Custom

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 7/13

Dictionary dialog. If you have created an exclusion dictionary, you can use this method to add it to

the Custom Dictionaries list to make it more easily accessible for adding or removing entries.

Figure 6. The Add Custom Dictionary dialog

Too little spell checking

In recent versions of Word you have a number of options about how Word checks spelling. If you

have “Check spelling as you type” checked in the Spelling & Grammar Options dialog (Office

Button | Word Options | Proofing in Word 2007; File | Options | Proofing in Word 2010) (seeFigure 2), Word will put a wavy red underline under words it doesn’t recognize. If you opt not to

check spelling as you type, you can still run the spelling checker explicitly by pressing F7 or 

selecting Tools | Spelling and Grammar (Review | Proofing | Spelling & Grammar in Word2007/2010).

Important Note: Spell checking is not available in protected forms. Word will not mark misspelled words with a wavy underline, pressing F7 has no effect (not even an error message),

and Spelling and Grammar is disabled (dimmed) on the Tools menu. This is by design. You canspell-check protected forms using a macro, but this will require that users of the form be willing to

enable macros. For instructions, see "How to enable the spellchecker in a protected document."

Nothing marked as misspelled

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 8/13

If no words are being marked as misspelled, even though you have "Check spelling as you type"

enabled, it may be that you are an extremely good speller and not using any words that Word

doesn't recognize. More likely, there is something wrong. Check the Spelling & Grammar

Options (Office Button | Word Options | Proofing in Word 2007; File | Options | Proofing in

Word 2010) to make sure that "Hide spelling errors in this document" is not checked (see Figure

2).

If it is not, the usual problem is that the text has been formatted as “Do not check spelling or grammar” (see Figure 1). To correct this, select the entire document (Ctrl+A), apply the desired

language to it, and clear the check box for “Do not check spelling and grammar” in the Tools |

Language | Set Language dialog (Review | Proofing | Set Language in Word 2007/2010).

If you have Word 2007 and find that the spelling checker just does not work at all—that is, it

doesn't mark any words as misspelled, and running the spelling checker with F7 doesn't find any

errors—there are two more steps you can try:

1.Click on Office Button | Word Options | Add-Ins | Manage: Disabled Items. If you seeany disabled items that relate to spelling, try enabling them.

2. If the previous suggestion doesn't help, then there is a Registry edit that may. If you are not

comfortable editing the Registry, then you can use the Microsoft-provided "Fix it" in this

article. To perform the edit yourself:a. Close Word and any other open applications.

 b. Click on Start | Run | Open and type "regedit" (without the quotation marks).

c. If the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing

Tools\1.0\Override exists, delete it.

d. Exit the Registry Editor.

e. Restart your computer.

Important Note: Although in most cases this operation will correct the problem,

it could create a new one if you have installed a third-party spelling checker.

Third-party companies use the Override key to redirect spellchecking to their

speller instead of the built-in Office lexicon. But if the third-party checker works

only for English, say, but disables the built in spell checker for all languages,

then spell checking might work in English (using the third-party speller) but not

in French or Spanish. Deleting the Override key will restore function for English,

French, and Spanish (using the built-in speller) but will disable the third-party

add-in.

Misspelled words skipped

Sometimes, even though “Check spelling as you type” is enabled and some words are marked as

misspelled, you will type or see a word that you know is misspelled, but Word does not mark it or find it when you run the spelling checker. The usual reason for this is that that portion of the text

has been formatted as “Do not check spelling or grammar.” You may even get a message from the

spelling checker that "The spelling and grammar check is complete. Text marked with 'Do not

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 9/13

check spelling or grammar' was skipped." Remember that language is a character format that can

affect even small selected portions of your text. Although most of your document may have the

correct language applied, it's possible for certain portions of it to be formatted as "Do not check spelling or grammar." You can use this to your advantage, but when you do want it checked, select

the problem text (or the entire document) and clear the check box for "Do not check spelling or 

grammar" in the Tools | Language | Set Language dialog (Review | Proofing | Set Language inWord 2007/2010).

Rechecking ignored words

Occasionally you will right-click on a misspelled word and choose Ignore All, then later think 

 better of it. Once you’ve told Word to ignore the word, though, how do you get it to see the word

as misspelled again? Go to Tools | Options | Spelling & Grammar (Office Button | Word

Options | Proofing in Word 2007; File | Options | Proofing in Word 2010) and click Recheck 

Document. You will get the message box shown in Figure 7. Answer Yes and your ignored word

will again be marked as misspelled.

Figure 7. Recheck Document message box

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 whenyou 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 todeal with variant spellings that, while they may be generally accepted as correct, you prefer not to

use. If you have Word 2007 or 2010, 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” thatyou would have added to an exclusion dictionary in previous versions.

Too much spell checking

 Everything marked as misspelled

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 10/13

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 toselect the entire document; then, in the Tools | Language | Set Language dialog (Review |

Proofing | Set Language in Word 2007/2010), select the correct language if proofing tools are

available. If you don’t have proofing tools for the language installed, you can hide the spellingerrors.

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 asincorrect. 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 charactersfrom 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’trecognize 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 theappearance 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 wantothers 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 orgrammar.”

Does this affect all mydocuments?

Yes No No

Will I see wavy underlines? No No No

Will others see wavyunderlines?

Probably; depends onlocal setting

 No No

Will I or others be able to Yes Yes No

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 11/13

check spelling explicitly?

• Option 1: Disable “Check spelling as you type.” If you clear the check box for “Check 

spelling as you type” on the Spelling & Grammar tab of the Tools | Options dialog(Office Button | Word Options | Proofing in Word 2007; File | Options | Proofing in

Word 2010), spelling errors will not be marked in any document on your machine, but youwill still be able to run the spelling checker explicitly (using F7 or Tools | Spelling and

Grammar or, in Word 2007/2010, 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 notrun 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 spellingerrors 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 optionwhen 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 thetext, go to Tools | Language | Set Language (Review | Proofing | Set Language in Word

2007/2010), 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 beable 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 to apply 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

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 12/13

add the “Do not check spelling or grammar” property to a style, in the Modify Style dialog, click 

Format | Language and check the box for “Do not check spelling or grammar.” If you are creating

a character style, it should be defined as “Default Paragraph Font + Do not check spelling or grammar” so that you can apply it to any style of text without changing the font formatting.

Figure 8. The Modify Style dialog box

Important Note: Often you will want to create a "no proofing" character style to apply to selectedtext. You should base this on Default Paragraph Font, and 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 todo is suppress use of the proofing tools, you have to explicitly tell Word what language's proofing

8/2/2019 Mastering Spell

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/mastering-spell 13/13

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 automatichyphenation 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 describedabove).

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 formsindividually.

Word added in error

To remove a word from a custom dictionary, open the Custom Dictionaries dialog, select theappropriate 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; see this Microsoft Knowledge Basearticle. 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), thisindicates 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 hadcreated 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.