Spell Checking Not Catching a Misspelled Word

Tonya inherited her work computer system from someone else. She believes they told Word that a misspelled word was correctly spelled, so now the misspelled word is not caught by Word as misspelled. Tonya wonders if there is a way to cause Word, once again, to correctly recognize the misspelled word when doing a spell check.

The short answer is yes, you can do this. If Tonya's hunch about what happened is correct, then when the coworker indicated the word was correctly spelled, Word added that incorrectly spelled word to what is called a custom dictionary. Word can actually have multiple custom dictionaries, and the misspelled word could be in any of them. To edit the custom dictionaries, follow these steps:

1. 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.)
2. At the left side of the dialog box click Proofing.
3. Click the Custom Dictionaries button. Word displays the Custom Dictionaries dialog box. There may be multiple dictionaries listed in the dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Custom Dictionaries dialog box.

4. In the list of dictionaries, select the one you want to edit.
5. Click Edit Word List. (If the Edit Word List button is unavailable, that means you cannot edit that dictionary. This can be the case with some custom dictionaries added by specialized add-ins.) Word displays a dialog box showing the words in the dictionary.
6. Look through the words and see if the misspelled word is there. If it is, select the word and click Delete.
7. Click OK to dismiss the word list for the custom dictionary. The Custom Dictionaries dialog box should still be visible.
8. Repeat steps 4 through 7 for any other dictionaries in the Custom Dictionaries dialog box.
9. Close all the open dialog boxes.

Once the custom dictionary is edited, the next time that Word performs a spell check, your misspelled word should be marked as misspelled, as you would expect.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13931) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.