Words that Leopard’s spellchecker chokes on

Nick Mediati — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:30:33 +0000

We trust spellcheckers to be right, right? We expect that the spellchecker will yield an accurate correction, or at the least, real words. Oddly enough, though, I’ve stumbled upon a few misspellings that cause Leopard’s built-in spellchecker to throw up some amusing–though incorrect–results (a friend shared one with me; I discovered two of them). Mind you, I never added any of these to my spellchecker dictionary. These are all using the default English spelling dictionary; I even checked while using a new user account. At any rate, here they are, in no particular order:

The typo: instrucitons

The intended word: instructions

The suggested spelling: isntrucitons

The notes: The spellchecker does offer the correct spelling as one of the choices; how isntrucitons ended up in there is beyond me…

The typo: applicatication

The intended word: application

The suggested spelling: applicaticataion

The notes: FAIL.

Also, Dictionary.com offers up upland cotton as a possible alternate for applicaticataion and no alternates whatsoever for applicatication. That said, it was one heck of a typo on my part in the first place, but that’s no excuse for making up words! :P

The typo: positiove

The intended word: positive

The suggested spelling: positionve

The notes: Like the first one, the correct word was among the choices, but again, Leopard decides to have a little fun with our minds.

I’m guessing these are just bugs in the spellchecker. Hey, at least this bug is mostly harmless!

Are there any words that you have noticed that spellchecker gets incorrect? Let us know in the comments.

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Words that Leopard’s spellchecker chokes on