Turning Off Spell Checking

If you want to turn off spell checking in Word, there are two ways you can do it. Most people who want to turn it off do so because their specific documents may have many spelling errors which are not really spelling errors—you know, caused by jargon or abbreviations or highly specialized words. If you want to globally turn off spell checking for your documents, you can do so by following these steps:

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



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

3. Clear the Check Spelling As You Type check box.
4. Click OK.

Now, in order to check the spelling of your document you will need to explicitly command Word to initiate the process. (The easiest way to do this, of course, is to press F7.)

If you want to turn off spell checking for a specific paragraph, you can do so by making sure there is no language associated with the paragraph. You do this by following these steps:

1. Select the paragraph for which you want spell checking turned off.
2. Display the Review tab of the ribbon.
3. For Word 2007, find the Proofing group and click on Set Language. For Word 2010 and later versions, Language has its own group in the Review tab. From the group select Language | Set Proofing Language. Word displays the Language dialog box.
4. Make sure the Do Not Check Spelling or Grammar check box is selected.
5. Click on OK.

At this point Word will not check the spelling or grammar of the paragraph. It will, however, check any other paragraph in your document for which proofing is not turned off. If you find yourself changing the language setting for many paragraphs in your document, you may be best to use styles to define a specific style that has proofing turned off. You can then apply that style wherever necessary in your document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10804) 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: Turning Off Spell Checking.