Why did Word forget how to spell?

January 9, 2007 8:02 AM

Why is Microsoft Word suddenly marking correctly spelled words as misspelled?

This is driving me nuts. Word is marking words such as this, cat, retail and silver with the red squiggly line, as if they're misspelled. It must be a problem with the document and not the application because the same piece of text pasted into a new document looks normal. What gives? Is this just a corrupt file, or is there some doc setting that could cause this? I did not create this file, I'm just trying to edit it.

posted by mauglir to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Is it possible the document has revision tracking turned on, and that's what you're seeing rather than spellchecking? (By default it doesn't look the same, but the appearance of revisions can be changed.)
posted by staggernation at 8:06 AM on January 9, 2007

Best answer: Choice of language is a per-document setting. It sounds like the document language has been set to something other than English.

Go into the Tools menu, Language, Set Language... and pick English (US) or (UK) depending on your preference. You may need to Select All (Ctrl+A) first to tell it you want to affect the whole document.
posted by jon4009 at 8:17 AM on January 9, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks jon, that was it.
posted by mauglir at 8:20 AM on January 9, 2007

I see you got your answer, but anecdotally... At work, I had a computer that would decide at random times to start speaking French. Every now and then, I'd be writing in a Word document, and practically every word would get highlighted. I did as jon4009 said. But then a few hours/days/weeks later it would happen again. Then it just stopped. Weird.
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 1:39 PM on January 9, 2007

Same problem here as ObscureReferenceMan, except for me it would decide to do it only in tables. Somehow it was english for most of the document and french for random table cells. I never figured it out.
posted by polyglot at 4:29 PM on January 9, 2007