I am expanding on a Word.doc sent to me from Merry Olde England. Every now and then a perfectly spelled word was getting flagged by the spell checker. After allowing several I realized it is still looking for the British spelling! What the heck, the spell checker lexicon is part of the original document, not part of the of the actual US program I am working in? Or did something in the .doc headers trigger my program to switch to British? I looked at Tool, Options, Spell Checking and didn’t see anything about a British lexicon.
Not quite sure what your question is, but spell check language is set by each paragraph’s style. To make your copy of Word check US English, change the Normal style setting. That should change all others by cascade.
I believe all full installations of Word include at least the dozen most common language dictionaries. Word also uses a rules based approach rather than an exhaustive list approach.
OK, I open a new Word document and type “aluminum”. Nothing happens.
Now I open the document I have been working on, go to the end and hit return for a new paragraph and type “aluminum”, it immediately changes to “aluminium”, the British spelling.
I can’t see any way to edit the style that indicates language. This is Word 2003, by the way.
It’s a part of the “style” of a paragraph, but not the Word Style. Highlight the paragraph, or whole document or whatever and go to where the spell checker language is set in your Word version.