Many users rely on their word processing software to automatically check spelling and grammar. Over the years, Microsoft’s Office applications have become better and better at detecting spelling and grammar errors. But what do you do if the feature stops working?
If spell check is not working in Word, incorrect language settings are usually the problem. There can be several reasons for this. When spell check isn’t working properly, almost every word is flagged as a spelling error or nothing is highlighted even though words are misspelled.
If Word underlines almost every word as incorrect, this is a clear indication that the program is set to the wrong language. For example, if Word is set to French, it will highlight all but a few English words as incorrect. If that is why spell check is not working, you first have to set the right language for the text.
2. In the next dialog box, select the language you’re using in the text.
The following articles provide further useful tips and helpful advice for problems with Microsoft Word:
If you’re using a style, the spelling checker may incorrectly highlight words in new paragraphs, even though you already set English as the language for the entire text. This is because Word saves a separate language setting for each paragraph in the text. If you use a style that is incorrectly formatted because it uses a different language in certain formats, each new paragraph will be formatted in this different language. As a result, the spelling checker in Word will not work properly and display errors.
How to fix an incorrect style:
2. In the next dialog box, click the “Format” button at the bottom left. In the menu that appears, select “Language”.
4. Choose “OK” to save your settings. If you now type a new paragraph with the modified style, Word will not mark errors incorrectly because the text is set to the correct language.
If Word does not mark any misspelled words, including proper nouns or abbreviations that would normally be marked as spelling mistakes, it means the spelling checker is turned off. In this case, you can turn on spell check in Word.
How to turn on spell check in Word:
Occasionally, you’ll get an error message saying that the text contains too many spelling errors to continue displaying them. This message is misleading because Word can detect almost any number of errors in a document.
Word allows you to format different passages of text in different languages. The automatic spelling checker in Word won’t work if the language changes too many times in the text, for example if styles were incorrectly formatted.
Here’s how to fix the problem:
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