Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Hiding Spelling Errors.

Hiding Spelling Errors

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated March 25, 2023)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021

Word includes a feature that checks up on the spelling and grammar in your document as you type. You've seen the results—the red and green squiggly underlines that mark spelling and grammar errors.

For some people, the red underlines that denote spelling problems can be distracting, since their appearance can break your concentration as you are composing your document. Perhaps you would rather check spelling as a discrete phase of document development at a later time. If you find the red squiggly underlines distracting, you can turn them off. Simply follow these steps:

Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word Options. In Word 2010 and later versions display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
At the left side of the dialog box, click Proofing. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The proofing options of the Word Options dialog box.

At the bottom of the dialog box, make sure the Hide Spelling Errors in This Document Only check box is selected.
Click on OK.

Any existing red squiggly underlines should disappear. In order to check your spelling you will now explicitly need to start the spell checker.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (6104) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Hiding Spelling Errors.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is two more than 7?

2023-03-25 11:32:21

Simone L.

Dear Allen,
do you happen to have any tip for how to completely turn off the red highlighting for spelling / grammar errors? This appears to be a new feature and only started happening a few days ago. I've already turned off the red squiggly underlines and completely disabled the live-checking for grammar / spelling. That all works just fine. But as soon as I run a manual spell-check (for example, when I've finished writing a chapter in a longer document), Word will then highlight misspelled words with a light red color as soon as I simply hover my mouse over the respective word. Live-checking is still disabled, so it seems to remember the errors it found during my manual spell-check. This is, of course, extremely distracting, and the only way to make Word forget the errors again is to fully close the application and then re-open it with my document. I'm using Office Home & Business 2019 (not signed in with any account in Word itself), and there seems to have been an overhaul of the whole spell-check feature recently. I didn't install any manual updates myself but can't find when/how this update was automatically installed. I'm out of ideas. Thanks in advance for any suggestions! :-)

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