Spell-Check on the Fly
March 05, 2009
Pro Tip:
Mac OS X offers a really quick way to check the spelling of
individual words in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, TextEdit, Mail,
Stickies, and other text-based applications. In fact, you can check
spelling on the fly without leaving the application you’re using.
Here’s how.
When you misspell a word — or type one that doesn’t appear in the standard Apple dictionary, like the city of Tuscumbia, Alabama — Mac OS X highlights it with a dotted red line. To replace it with the correct spelling, right-click the word with your Mighty Mouse (or select it with your mouse and Control-click the word). 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 Tuscumbia — 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 Tuscumbia 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 Tuscumbia, 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 Tuscumbia 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.
