Spell Checker
Paste your writing to find words that are not in the dictionary. Each unknown word gets ranked suggestions — the nearest words by typing distance, so teh offers the first — and you can replace it, ignore it, or choose American or British spelling. Free, no sign-up, and your text stays in your browser.
Your text is checked in your browser and never uploaded. The only thing fetched is the word list, once per visit.
Separate words with commas, spaces or new lines. Case does not matter. Click Ignore on a result to add a word here.
Paste or type some text to check its spelling.
How to Use the Spell Checker
- Paste your text. The word list loads once, then the check runs as you type. Your text is never sent anywhere.
- Pick a spelling variety. Accept both leaves colour and color alone. American or British flags the other variety's spellings in blue and offers the right form.
- Work down the unknown words. Click a suggestion to replace every occurrence, or click Ignore for names, jargon and anything you meant. Ignored words are kept in the box above the results, so you can edit or copy the list.
- Tune the filters. By default capitalised words inside a sentence (names) and ALL-CAPS acronyms are skipped. Untick either to be stricter.
Where the Dictionary Comes From
The main word list is ENABLE, a public-domain list of about 168,000 words built for word games. It is lowercase and has no proper nouns, no contractions, and little of the vocabulary that appeared after the 1990s — internet, email and smartphone are missing. This tool adds its own short list of contractions (don't, they've), scholarly abbreviations (et al., DOI), modern and technical terms (dataset, Zotero, neoliberal) and the names of countries, nationalities and well-known scholars. Possessives (student's, students') are checked on the word without the ending, hyphenated compounds are checked part by part, and an accented word such as café is matched on its unaccented form.
Is the dictionary American or British?
Both. ENABLE is a North American list, but it includes the British forms too — colour, organise, centre and programme are all in it — so on its own it cannot tell you which variety you are using. That is why the tool has a separate spelling-variety option, built on the same word pairs as the British to American Spelling Converter.
How the Suggestions Are Ranked
Suggestions are the dictionary words closest to what you typed, measured by Damerau–Levenshtein distance: the fewest insertions, deletions, substitutions and swaps of adjacent letters needed to turn one word into the other. Plain edit distance treats every edit alike, which ranks ten and the equally for teh. This tool weights the edits by how people actually mistype:
| Mistake | Cost | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Two neighbouring letters swapped | 0.6 | teh → the |
| A letter left out | 0.9 | recive → receive |
| A doubled letter left out or added | 0.8 | comming → coming |
| A key hit next to the intended one on a QWERTY keyboard | 0.7 | wprd → word |
| Any other substitution, or an extra letter | 1.0 | wxrd → word |
Ties go to the more common word, so tomorrow beats the obscure tommyrot for tommorow. For the example text in the widget, recieve gives receive, relieve, recurve, received, and definately gives definitely, defiantly, definably, delicately. Case is kept: Recieve offers Receive and RECIEVE offers RECEIVE.
What a Spell Checker Cannot Catch
A dictionary check finds strings that are not words. It cannot tell that form should be from, or their should be there, because both are perfectly good words. It does not catch a missing word, a repeated word, a grammar slip or a wrong name. A misspelled surname at the start of a sentence is flagged, but the same name mid-sentence is skipped by default, because the tool cannot know every name. Read the text once more by eye, and run it through the Grammar Checker for the mechanical errors a dictionary misses.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is this spell checker free, and is my text uploaded?
- It is free with no sign-up. Your text is checked entirely in your browser and is never uploaded. The only thing the page fetches is the word list, once per visit, from this site.
- Does it check American or British spelling?
- Either, as you choose. By default it accepts both varieties, because its dictionary contains both. Select American English and spellings such as colour and favourite are flagged with the American form; select British English and color and organize are flagged instead.
- Why does it flag a word that is spelled correctly?
- The dictionary is large but not complete. Names, new terms and specialist vocabulary may be missing. Click Ignore to accept the word for this session, or add it to the ignore box. The checker never changes your text unless you click a suggestion.
- How do I make it ignore names and acronyms?
- Both are skipped by default: capitalised words inside a sentence, and ALL-CAPS words such as APA or NASA. A name at the start of a sentence is still checked, so add it to the ignore list if it is flagged. Anything with a digit, a URL, an email address or a DOI is skipped automatically.
- How are suggestions ranked?
- By weighted Damerau–Levenshtein distance. Swapped neighbouring letters, a missing or doubled letter, and a key next to the right one on a QWERTY keyboard all count as small slips, so the likeliest correction comes first. Ties are broken in favour of common words.
- Does it catch real-word errors like their and there?
- No. A dictionary check only finds strings that are not words. For their/there, to/too, and your/you're you need to read the sentence, or use a grammar check that looks at context.
- How many words can it check at once?
- A full paper checks in a fraction of a second. Suggestions are calculated only for the unknown words shown on screen, 20 at a time, so a text with many unknown words loads more as you ask for them.