A little rant about spell checkers

Last edited: 3rd January 2024

If you have read any of my blog posts, then you will notice mistakes, a lot of them in fact, and I apologise for any of them, and I try to reduce the number of mistakes by for example looking up how to spell words correctly. However, there is also a feature that computers have allowed us NPCs to use: Spell checkers!

There is just one issue: They suck!

Sometimes, words that are correct are mislabeled as wrong. This rarely happens, but I remember when my text editor of choice told me that the word "contradictory" was incorrect even when spelling it correctly. It was so confusing to me when I looked up the word, only to realise that I spelled it correctly. This is even worse for unofficial words where you can still do mistakes in them, but the spell checker will underline it anyway.

They all also have a huge issue when it comes to bilingual content. A lot of spell checkers can't correct two languages at one time. Typing something in English and another language at the same time will result into one language showing up as spelling mistakes. This may depend on the spell checker, but in most of them, it stayed the same for me.

What is also very jarring is that the mistakes often times get underlined. In some spell checkers, the underlining makes the text harder to read if you ignore the so called "mistakes" especially because of some spell checkers underlining mistakes red, which distracts you even more.

Let's not consider spell checkers that automatically correct your words. Those not only get in your way, but they will never teach you how to spell things correctly since your brain does not need to think about spelling, and even then, they automatically change the entire word into something else. Considering that, the idea of automatically correcting your mistakes is a dumb idea. And no, AI won't change that. Don't think that AI is smarter at that.

Now, this is just a ramble from myself, but those aforementioned have caused me to distrust spell checkers, which is the last thing that you would a spell checker to ever do.