I noticed a version of the following tip on Apple’s website, and it reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a customer who was confused about Mac OS X’s spellchecking capabilities. They found the information helpful, so maybe some of you will too!
Mac OS X offers a fast and easy way to check the spelling of individual words in Safari, iChat, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, TextEdit, Mail, Stickies, and other OS X-based applications. Here’s how.
When you misspell a word—or type one that doesn’t appear in the standard Apple dictionary, like the city of Waitsfield, Alabama—Mac OS X highlights it with a dotted red line. To replace it with the correct spelling, right-click the word with your right-click enabled mouse, (or select it with your mouse and Control-click the word on single button mice and laptops). A pop-up menu appears, offering a list of possible replacements. Click the correct spelling of the word to instantly update your document.
If you know a highlighted term—such as Waitsfield—is spelled correctly, and you don’t want Mac OS X to highlight it in future occurrences, choose the Ignore Spelling option from the list. Mac OS X removes the highlighting below Waitsfield wherever it appears, and won’t underline this word again if you use it subsequently in your current document.
If you want all text-based Mac OS X applications to know the correct spelling of Waitsfield, you can customize the Mac OS X dictionary to include this correct spelling of the term. To do so, choose the Learn Spelling option. Mac OS X adds this spelling to its dictionary, and Waitsfield appears in the pop-up list of correctly spelled terms, whether you’re using Pages, Keynote or any other text-based Mac OS X application that uses its spelling dictionary.
Note: sometimes OS X’s built in dictionary can’t fix odd misspellings. In this case, I simply paste the word into Google, and use Google’s very good built-in spellchecker.