Why are spellcheckers *so* bad!

I was just typing a message about covid and the spellchecker gave me a red underline for “denialists” and “overcounted”.

Those are… both clearly words. It suggested “denialist” for the first one, and had no idea for the other. So apparently, here we are in 2022 and the spell-checker

  1. Is missing normal common dictionary words.
  2. Doesn’t know that you can make a noun a plural by adding an s to the end.
  3. When the word it doesn’t know is two other dictionary words smashed together, doesn’t suggest the two separate words.

What the hell.

Your exasperation is reasonable, but as long as it just flags words like those, and doesn’t try to “correct” them or insist that I must have meant something else, I’m willing to live with it.

What operating system and browser are you using? I don’t get any corrections for denialist or overcounted. Windows 10, Edge browser.

I’m using Chrome on a Mac.

Tried Chrome on my Windows machine and neither word got dinged. Tried on Chrome and Edge on my iPhone and still no problems. The spellchecker does work, I also used a nonsense word on all the tests to make sure it engaged.

Maybe just the MacOS spellcheck sucks? Or the Chrome for MacOS?

The only time I ever have problems with spellcheck is in a program I use called Notepad++ and I think it just has a wonky dictionary.

Denialists overcounted.

No underlines for either on my PC using Chrome.

Ok now this is interesting. I assumed that the spellchecker was built into the browser and why on earth would Chrome have separate dictionaries for separate OSes, but maybe something else is going on here.

I just tried those words in the Slack windows app: no underlines.

And, Webex Teams: both are underlined as spelling errors.

I confirm that Chrome on Windows works for me. Firefox on Windows doesn’t.

Yeah Firefox on Windows also dings those words for me.

Yeah - my issue is when I type exactly what I wish, and it “corrects” it to something incorrect. I get the impression such things are aimed at folk who type like texting - where they type a couple of letters and choose among the offered choices. Not at all how I type/text, but has made me wonder if I need to change my method of typing/proofing.

I hve th eopposite problem, using MS Outlook Editor on Windows.

I frequently have a draft e-mail, and I see obvious spelling errors. But Editor gives me the “100%” no problems signal. Sometimes I can’t even open the spell-checker on Editor. No probs, no open. Even though I see the errors on the draft.

The weird thing is that if I hit “send” with “check spelling on Send” turned on, it works perfectly; finds the errors and makes appropriate suggestions.

Au contraire, when I wrote an email in French the other day, I was impressed that Gmail spell-checked and converted my typed “soeur” into “sœur,” which saved me from going hunting for that pesky “œ” ligature. It must be because I added French to my Google profile as one of the languages I use.

Back in the 1980s on an early Mac, I wrote “anomaly” which was underlined by the spellchecker. Their suggested spelling was “anomaly” which confused me. I chalked it up to the early days of spell check. I did chuckle at the anomaly, though.

I’m with others, though, an underlined suggestion is fine, just don’t automatically change it.

The built-in one for Brave browser is remarkably bad. E.g., it didn’t even have USB in it. For a computer browser.

Lately I’ve been on a tear of slight misspellings that it can’t find the correction for. The algorithm just sucks.

I knew people back in the day who published papers on string-to-string editing (which is the basis of spelling correction). Brave is clearly not using simple and efficient 45 year old tech.

(And that’s not getting into stuff like how some spell checkers flag “labelled” as an error and suggest “labeled” instead and for others it is vice versa. Brave seems to accept both. Let’s try “modelled” and “modeled”. Likes both of those too.)

Chrome for Windows uses the OS spellcheck now, because it was better than the one they had. It has good coverage of vocabulary, but it does a lousy job of figuring out spelling suggestions, like when words are just a couple letters off or have letters switched. Also, for any words that are allowed to have accents, it seems to leave out the unaccented variant, which I find annoying.

On macOS and Linux, I think they fall back to the old Hunspell engine they used to use, though it’s possible macOS also has its own spellcheck that Chrome can use.

Chrome does have the option for “Enhanced spell check” that sends the words off to Google instead, but that is turned off by default. Based on my experience, this is likely due to the high latency. It waits until it sends off the word to Google to mark it as misspelled, and seemingly sends every single word, rather than caching them. It can take seconds to mark words. IMHO they really ought to have a way to mark words that it is unsure about and only send those off.

There are also various extensions (e.g. Grammarly) that can add their own spellcheck to Chrome. Though, if you do pick Grammarly, I suspect you’d want to disable the actual grammar check. It often has false positives, and treats a lot of style issues as grammar issues.

BTW, I don’t know of any spelling dictionary that automatically includes -s plurals. They all use a full list of words, usually the X most common ones. If the plural isn’t as common, it may not make the list.

I would like to see a spelling dictionary that used data on what words get added by a high percentage of people who bother adding words to the spelling dictionary. And one that learns common misspellings, using that to rank and even maybe find a new suggestions.

Good answer, @BigT. Thanks for that!

I would swear the one I have in MS Office, MS Edge, and Google Chrome on Win10 are crowdsourcing their ideas of correct spelling.

I now encounter a bunch of words that are absolutely positively spelled wrong that the spellcheckers think are spelled right.

I’ve checked my own personal dictionary in Win10 and that’s not the source of these mistakes. So it’s got to be coming from elsewhere.

And don’t get me started on the same issue in Android.