Word has its own spell checker, so why check a Word document online? Because Word is not always where the document is. You may be on a computer without Office, on a tablet, or looking at a file someone sent you to review before it goes out. And sometimes Word is there but checks the text against the wrong language, so a British report is covered in red lines under every colour and organise, or nothing is underlined at all.
An online spell checker reads the DOCX file, checks the whole text in one go and gives you the corrected document back as a Word file. This guide shows how to do it step by step, and what to look for so the check is worth the few minutes it takes.
Before you start your online Word spell check
- Keep the original. Work on a copy, or simply keep the file you upload, so you can compare the corrected version with what you started from.
- Settle tracked changes first. If the document still has suggestions from a colleague, accept or reject them in Word so the text you check is the text you will actually send.
- Know your language variant. American and British English spell many words differently. Decide which one the document is written in before you check it, because the checker needs to know too.
- Note the special words. Names of people, products and places, and the terms of your trade, are often missing from any dictionary. Expect them to be underlined, and have a list of the right spellings at hand.
How to spell check a Word document online for free, step by step
- Open the Online Spell Checker. It is free to use, and you do not need an account.
- Open your document: choose the DOCX file from your computer. The spell checker also opens TXT, ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown and PDF files, and you can always paste text into the editor instead.
- Choose the language. Pick English and its variant (American, British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand or South African English) instead of leaving it to detection: when the checker detects English by itself, it checks it as American English. Turn on Picky mode if you also want style suggestions, such as wordy phrases that could be shorter.
- Press Check spelling. Every mistake is underlined in the text and listed beside it, grouped by kind: spelling, grammar, punctuation and, in Picky mode, style.
- Go through the suggestions. Click an underlined word or a card in the list and pick the fix. Ignore a suggestion that is wrong for your text, and use Add to dictionary for names and terms that are spelled correctly.
- Download the corrected document. Choose DOCX to get a Word file back with its formatting kept, or save the text as ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown, PDF or plain TXT if you need another format.
What the online spell check covers
A good check covers more than typos. Here is what each kind of mark means:
- Spelling: typos, missing or doubled letters, and words that are not spelled that way in the variant you chose, such as color in a British text.
- Grammar: a verb that does not agree with its subject, a where an belongs, and pairs that are easy to confuse, like its and it's or then and than.
- Punctuation: a missing comma after an introductory word, a space before a full stop, a doubled punctuation mark.
- Style (Picky mode): wordy phrases, repetition and wording that could be simpler. These are suggestions, not mistakes, so take the ones that make the text better and leave the rest.
For examples of the grammar mistakes a checker flags, with a fix for each, see Ten common grammar mistakes a grammar checker finds.
Tips for spell checking long or complex documents
Checking long reports and theses online
One check covers a whole document of up to 150,000 characters, about 60 pages. If yours is longer, check it in parts, for example one chapter at a time. Shorter parts are also easier to review carefully: a list of four hundred suggestions invites clicking through them without reading.
Checking names, brands and technical terms
Add the words you use often to your dictionary. It is kept in your browser, so the next document you check there will not flag the same names again. If one of those words is genuinely misspelled somewhere in the text, though, the checker will now leave it alone too, so look over names yourself.
Parts of your Word document that are easy to overlook
Headers and footers, footnotes, captions and the text in tables and text boxes are the places where a mistake survives every round of editing. After downloading, open the file and read those parts once yourself.
When the AI spell checker is the better option
The spell checker works with dictionaries and grammar rules. That makes it fast and predictable, and every mark comes with an explanation. What rules find hard are mistakes that are real words, like form instead of from, and sentences that are correct but clumsy.
The AI Spell Checker & Grammar Checker reads whole sentences and suggests corrections in context, so it can catch the word that is spelled right but wrong where it stands. It costs more to run, so free use is limited: keep it for the documents that matter most, such as an application or a report for a client. For a full comparison, read Spell checker vs AI spell checker: which should you use?.
If you have Word: three spell check settings to review
When Word's own checker seems to miss everything, the cause is usually a setting rather than a perfect text:
- The proofing language. Select the text and look under Review, Language, Set Proofing Language. The language must match the text, and the box that tells Word not to check spelling or grammar must be clear.
- Hidden errors. Under File, Options, Proofing, Word can hide spelling and grammar errors in one document only. A file that came from someone else may have that turned on.
- Styles that skip checking. A paragraph style can carry its own language setting. If one style is set to skip proofing, every paragraph using it is ignored.
In short: how to spell check a Word document online
Open the DOCX in the Online Spell Checker, choose the right variant of English, press Check spelling, review each suggestion and download the result as DOCX. It takes a few minutes, needs no installation and no account, and the formatting of your document stays as it was.