Would you prefer a spell-check program that marked every unrecognized word as wrong, or one that only marked wrong the words that it knows are wrong?

I like spell-checks that have the know…

I find little unnecessary red dashes all over my page extremely irritating, especially because Word’s spell check cites my name as spelled wrong every time. Please, spell check! Let me have artistic freedom…artist license! And just mark the words wrong that officially go against the Webster grain! Word checks that mark every stinkin’ unfamiliar thing wrong think they know it all!

Forgive the drama. I have had a long love-hate relationship with word-checks.

I always spend half my time adding misspelled words (according to Word) to the list of exceptions. If Word could just remember my exceptions for all documents instead of letting me add them every single time I open a new document, that would be great.

I don’t mind a spell checker to underline all words it doesn’t recognize because it stops me and forces me to think about what I just wrote down. But I do agree that spell checkers need more intelligence, that includes carrying over exceptions to other documents.

Here’s the thing: Doesn’t spellcheck work by comparing your words against the words it “knows” and “flagging” non-matches? So, when it flags something that is “unrecognized” it doesn’t really know if it’s wrong or if it just doesn’t know, does it?

MS Word used to have the option of adding a new word to its database of words so that it recognizes it in the future, but in Office XP, it doesn’t really prompt me for that ever…Maybe if MS didn’t have such a corner on the market, they’d actually improve their products in a timely manner…+sighs+

It doesn’t really bother me either way. There is the function that allows you to “skip all” instances of a word, and that enables me to get through the unrecognizeable and misspelled words in a document pretty quickly.

Spell check programs compare words in your document to words it has listed as correct. The programs do not know anything.

For people with a need for any specialized dictionary of terms, they add those dictionaries to the spell check programs built in word list.

To the program there are only two categories of words, recognized and unrecognized.

Sorry but computer programs do not know about right and wrong – like many people!

I would say that I would NOT prefer the spell check not underlining words that it does not recognize and would prefer it underlining the words it knows its wrong. I don’t know…it makes it seem less like a person who jumps to conclusions about the unknown and a uncertainty.

I hate the marking of unknown words.

I think that is a good idea, but they should just be marked differently and have a link or something to explain why it’s wrong.

If the spell-check program was written by God himself, then maybe I’d prefer your omniscient spell-check program. Until then—and since I don’t believe enough in God’s programming abilities anyway—I’m very content to live with what I have: spell-check utilities of limited capacity in various programs (but still more certainty than even my own award-winning spelling ability), and the ability to add words as I go, from specialized jargon, slang, acronyms and the like.

Let’s just go with a spell check program only marking wrong the words that it knows are wrong. I’ll just surf on over to dictionary.com for all the other dubious words.

Fine-tuning of precision and recall is a tricky beast.

I’d like it to give me an option of either method.

Are the following words right or wrong?

their
beard
quite
organise
immorality
to

If they’re wrong, what should they be?

@Jeruba, yore rite.

The context of the word and the origin of the writer as @jeruba subtly points out determine whether the spelling is appropriate in the context.

None of the words she listed are inherently wrong in a list like that at least according to a Canadian or UK dictionary.

@Dr_Lawrence
My present spellchecker will mark as incorrect any word that it does not recognize. This vexes me, since my writing often includes words that don’t exist in English. I would rather have a spellchecker that will leave words like “Quiesa” alone but still alert me to when I leave a ‘c’ out of “accommodating”.

You need either an additional or more appropriate dictionary for your program or you must teach it to accept new correct words as they first appear.

Thank you, @Dr_Lawrence. Those are all real words, of course. But—what if I meant

there, they’re
bread, bred, breed, board
quiet, quit
organism, organize
immortality
too, two

(etc.)?

The thing about knowing that a word is wrong is that it still depends on getting a match. So the reference list would have to include all possible misspellings of a given word together with the word they should have been.

And you can’t necessarily be sure what they should have been, even in context, much less think of all the ways that someone might misspell a word. Sometimes they are so far off that they don’t even seem to be in the same ballpark. I am astonished daily here on fluther at the misspellings I see that I positively never could have thought of. Just the other day I saw “interperate” instead of “interpret.” I could have lived to 190 and never have thought of that.

So who’s going to make the exhaustive list of wrong spellings of each and every word? And where’s the line between a misspelling and an out-and-out wrong word? The last thing I want is more Microsoft-fascistic quasi-mind-reading software messing with my compositions.