A good online spelling check program checks more than single words: it also checks grammar and punctuation, knows your language variant, reads whole documents, and explains each mark so that you decide. This article goes through those features one by one and shows how the Spell Checker and the AI Spell Checker handle each of them.
No one catches every error in their own text: you know what you meant to write, so you read that instead of what is on the page. A spell checker does not have that problem, but spell checkers differ a lot.
1. How it checks your text
There are three basic ways to check a text:
- Word by word. The simplest checker marks every word it does not find in its dictionary. It cannot see a real word in the wrong place.
- By grammar rules. A better checker also applies rules to the way words fit together, so it can catch, for example, a verb that does not agree with its subject, or a missing comma.
- By reading whole sentences. The broadest approach looks at the whole sentence. It can tell that form is wrong in "a letter form my bank", although form is a correct word.
The website has an app for each of the last two. The Spell Checker checks with dictionaries and grammar rules: it is fast and predictable, and it explains every mark it makes. The AI Spell Checker has an AI model read whole sentences, so it also catches real words in the wrong place and clumsy wording. It costs more to run, so its free use is limited. Spell checker or AI spell checker helps you choose between the two.
2. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation in one check
A check that ignores grammar and punctuation leaves half of the work to you. Look for a program that checks all three at once and says what kind of problem each mark is.
The Spell Checker underlines each issue in your text and lists it beside the text, sorted by kind: Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation. Each kind is also a filter, so in a long list you can fix the typos first and the commas later.
3. Your language, and its variant
Color is correct in American English, but British English spells it colour. A checker that does not know which English you write marks correct words or misses wrong ones. So make sure that you can choose the variant, not only the language.
In the Spell Checker, you pick the language and its variant: English as American, British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, or South African English; German for Germany, Austria, or Switzerland; and more than 30 languages in all. The app can also detect the language, but detected English is checked as American English, so choose British English yourself if you write it. British or American English? explains how to keep your spelling consistent.
4. More than one way to add your text
Some checkers only take text that you paste into a box. That is fine for an email, but not for a report of 20 pages. A flexible program also opens whole documents.
The Spell Checker opens on a text box for up to 150,000 characters of typed or pasted text. It also opens documents of up to 100 pages:
- Word (DOCX and DOC), OpenDocument (ODT), and RTF
- PDF, including scanned PDFs: a page without a text layer is read with text recognition (OCR)
- TXT, HTML, Markdown, and EPUB
- Photos and scans of pages (JPG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, BMP, and GIF), which text recognition reads
The file can come from your computer, from a link (Paste URL), or from cloud storage. A document is checked page by page, so you can correct page 1 while the next pages are still being read.
5. Explanations, and the last word for you
A name, a technical term, or a deliberate spelling is not a mistake, so a checker that changes your text without asking can make it worse. Look for one that explains each suggestion and lets you say no.
In the Spell Checker, click an underline or a card in the list to see the explanation, then pick a fix or ignore the suggestion. Add to dictionary keeps a word, such as the name of your company, from being flagged again. The word is kept in this browser only.
6. Style suggestions when you want them
Correct is not always clear, but style advice is noise when you only want the errors. So it should be your choice. The Spell Checker has Picky mode for this: turn it on, and the check adds Style suggestions: wordy phrases, words you repeat, and wording that could be simpler. They are suggestions, not mistakes.
7. Your document back in its own format
After the check, you need the corrected text where it belongs. In the Spell Checker, Copy text takes it back to your email or editor. For a document, Download gives you PDF, DOCX, ODT, RTF, TXT, HTML, or Markdown. A Word or OpenDocument file downloaded in its own format keeps its formatting: you get the original file with each fix written into it.
Check a text in 5 steps
The Spell Checker is free to use and needs no account, so you can try all of this at once:
- Open the Spell Checker, and paste your text or open a document.
- Choose the language and its variant.
- Turn on Picky mode if you also want style suggestions.
- Press Check spelling.
- Go through the underlined issues, then copy the text or download the document.
How to use the online spell checker explains each step in detail. Whichever program you use, read the result once more yourself: no checker knows whether a name, a date, or a number is the right one.