Spelling mistakes in published documents, personal letters, and work emails can be em­bar­rass­ing. At worst, your audience may question your expertise or interpret your mistakes as dis­respect­ful. Of course you might have simply made a typo while typing too fast or you just over­looked errors when proofread­ing. To avoid these mistakes, you can set Word to auto­mat­ic­ally flag mis­spelled words and even suggest cor­rec­tions.

Turning spell check on and off in Word

If spell check is turned on, Word marks mis­spelled words with a wavy red line and flags gram­mat­ic­al errors with a wavy blue line. This way, you can quickly correct mis­spelled words. However, these high­lighted errors can be dis­tract­ing when you’re writing. For this reason, Word gives you the option of disabling spell check while you type. When it’s time to proofread your work, you can turn on spell check in Word and show the flagged errors. That way you’ll see any spelling mistakes at a glance and can easily correct them.

  1. For spell check to work in Word, you have to set the right editing language. Select the text (the quickest way to do this is to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + A) and then click the language selection box in the status bar.
Image: Selecting the language in the status bar
The status bar shows the language of the text.
  1. Select the desired language.
Image: Selecting the text language
You can set the language of the text manually.

3. Do not rely on the option for detecting the language auto­mat­ic­ally. This feature often causes errors if the text contains words in other languages. Turn off “Detect language auto­mat­ic­ally” and click “OK”.

4. Open the “File” tab. Select “Options” and open the “Proofing” group.

5. To turn the Word spelling checker on or off, check or uncheck the boxes for “Check spelling as you type” and “Mark grammar errors as you type”.

Image: Turning off spell check in Word
You can turn the automatic spelling checker on or off at any time.
Tip

If spell check is not working, meaning Word is not marking any mistakes or is flagging errors in­cor­rectly, there can be several causes. In most cases, you can quickly resolve the issue. In another article, we present troubleshoot­ing strategies you can use if spell checker is not working in Word.

Accepting suggested cor­rec­tions

If you turned off Auto­Cor­rect while writing and want to go back and check your spelling in Word, you can turn this feature on by selecting the check­boxes for the options you want to use. However, this feature, es­pe­cially the grammar check, is more of a helpful aid than a real check. It often mis­in­ter­prets certain word com­bin­a­tions as errors and does not always detect gram­mat­ic­al errors. For this reason, it’s best not to rely on the automatic proofing tools.

If you right-click a word high­lighted with red or blue lines, Word displays a context menu with sug­ges­tions that you can apply with a single click. However, if more than two letters are incorrect or mixed up in a word, Word can no longer predict which word you ori­gin­ally intended to use.

Checking spelling and grammar manually

When you click the spell check icon in the status bar, a sidebar appears on the right for cor­rect­ing spelling and grammar.

Image: Icon for spell check in the status bar
The spell check icon is located next to the language selection box.

This sidebar auto­mat­ic­ally shows the next error based on the location of your cursor and suggests cor­rec­tions. You can click on “Ignore” to accept the in­cor­rectly flagged Word. Word will then no longer flag it as an error.

Image: Correcting grammatical errors
Suggested cor­rec­tions as well as grammar rules are displayed in the sidebar.

The grammar check feature is es­pe­cially useful because Word points out stylistic issues and grammar rules that can help you avoid mistakes in the future.

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Enabling automatic spell checking in older versions of Word

The last few versions of Word have an icon showing the status of the spelling checker in the status bar at the bottom of the window. In current versions of Word, you can right-click this icon to display a context menu for cus­tom­iz­ing the status bar. In older versions of Word, this context menu contained the options “Hide spelling errors” and “Hide grammar errors” and also provided direct access to spell check settings.

Tip

Microsoft 365 is a server-based office solution that includes Word, Excel, and Power­Point. The advantage of Microsoft 365 is that all updates are down­loaded auto­mat­ic­ally. The solution is ideal for home users, freel­an­cers or small busi­nesses.

Tip

See our other articles on Microsoft Word for more useful in­form­a­tion and helpful tips:

- Word keyboard shortcuts

- Word is not working

- Word macros

- Re­cov­er­ing Word documents

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