Turning Off the Check for Repeated Words

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated February 18, 2023)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365

Marianne types Inspector General interviews and very often people stammer, repeating the same word a few times. This causes the 'delete repeated word' window to pop up. Marianne tried turning off spell checking to fix the problem, but that obviously caused other problems. She wonders if there is a way to turn off checking for repeated words without turning off spell check.

The answer isn't to turn off spell checking altogether, but instead to modify how spell check does its work. 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.)
Click Proofing at the left side of the screen. (See Figure 1.)

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

Clear the Flag Repeated Words check box.
Click OK.

Not being an interview typist (particularly for the Inspector General) myself, there is another way that may be acceptable: Just change how you type the duplicate words. For instance, instead of typing "yes yes" (which would cause the duplicate-word flag to appear on the second "yes"), you could type "yes, yes" or "yes; yes" or place some other sort of punctuation or dash between the repeated words. This causes Word to not treat them as repeats; that only occurs if you repeat the words with no intervening punctuation.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10121) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365.

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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