As most of you know, the Firefox web browser has a built-in spellchecker. But I’ve noticed over the years that it’s very peculiar. It’s not just that it’s missing a lot of words: There are some words that it lacks, but others which it bizarrely has.
For instance, name me two people named Eartha. What’s that, you can only think of one? Apparently the folks who wrote Firefox’s dictionary know at least two, since it contains “Eartha”, but not “Kitt”.
Or more:
“Cincinnati”, but not “Los Angeles”
“North Dakota”, but not “Rhode Island”
“Polk” but not “Obama” (you’d think they would have updated the list some time in the past few years)
And one I just noticed today, that finally prompted me to post this thread, “overpressure”, but not “underpressure”.
Anyone else have any pairs like this? Lacking that, anyone have any examples of common words it lacks, or rare words it has?
Mine has Rhode Island and Obama. Los Angeles has both words underlined, which is just odd. It does have San Jose, when everybody knows it’s really spelled San José, which is a typo according to them.
Firefox is just using the Open Source package Hunspell for its spellchecker. As does Google Chrome, Opera, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and Mac OS X.
The key to effective use of this is the dictionary used to check spelling. There are versions for many languages, and even dialects – for example, US English vs. UK English.
Most applications have a method for you to add your own words to the dictionary, so they will not be flagged by the spellchecker. In Firefox, it’s as simple as clicking “Add to dictionary” on the menu that comes up when you right-click an underlined word.
I like Firefox spell checker for this reason. I can easily add many technical terms. I haven’t attempted this is some while now but there was once a time when a mistakenly added word was difficult to remove so I still double check carefully before I “Add to dictionary”.
I accidentally got contributer in the dictionary for a while, but thought they did it, so I filed a bug. They misunderstood, and actually added contributer to the dictionary. I’m relieved that it’s no longer there.