Filed under: Odds and ends
How knswledgable are you about cartgriqdges?
Newer updates to Mac OS X Leopard seem to have an interesting problem with their spelling databases: they include words that are most certainly wrong. The problem first appeared in 10.5.2 (U.S. English), and has not yet been corrected.
Canspice.org points to an Ars Technica discussion from March highlighting the misspelling knswledgable. If you open TextEdit, for example, and intentionally misspell the word "knowledgeable" (say, by spelling it "knowledgable"), then control-click to show a spelling suggestion, you might see the erroneous option.
The word "cartgriqdge" also appears to be similarly affected. Both words do not appear in the Mac OS X Dictionary application.
Urban Dictionary seized upon the new word, defining knswledgable as having "inordinate amounts of knowledge about useless spelling trivia."
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
tevetorbes said 11:33AM on 11-05-2008
Fun fact: knowledgable is also an acceptable spelling of the word according to a few online dictionaries. I run into a similar problem with the word "acknowledgments" quite often.
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Richard said 11:46AM on 11-05-2008
knswledgable, knowledgable & cartgriqdge are all marked incorrect in Mac OSX English English dictionary. I suggest they are correct American English spellings ;-)
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Dan Woods said 2:44PM on 11-05-2008
The Americans insist that English is a fluid language, and they are half right.
Changes in spelling and grammar should only be applied if it improves the comprehension of the word.
"Colour" is British, "Color" is Australian and American (although most Aussies I know use "Colour")
"Vigour" is British and Australian (it is derived from French, not British), "Vigor" is American.
These spelling variations make sense, Knswledgable and Cartgriqdges do not.
VanillaSpice said 9:32PM on 11-05-2008
The reason most Aussies use "colour" is because that is the correct spelling in Australian English - "Color" is not an Australian word. "Color" does get used here (and in the UK, too) but in both countries, it is incorrect.
Tom said 4:16AM on 11-06-2008
We do like our S and U's in our language ;)
Yup, it all seems good in the *cringe* "British" English dictionary. Interesting bug though!
Gussy said 11:52AM on 11-05-2008
Personally i can't get that error to occur. Maybe they have fixed it?
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Tony said 12:33PM on 11-05-2008
Confirmed here. TextEdit is convinced knswledgable is a valid word. Judging by the way it can't spell 'Colour' it's the US english dictionary (I can't find a way in osx to select a UK one, or any other in fact).
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Tony said 12:35PM on 11-05-2008
btw. running OSX 10.5.5 with all updates, so it's not fixed.
MacDragon said 2:12PM on 11-05-2008
knswledgable is redlined for me, colour goes through, color redlines.
to set british dictionary go to system prefs, international, and if british English is not showing on the list, then click edit list and tick it to make it show, and drag it to the top of the list to make it take top precedence.
codeman38 said 12:52PM on 11-05-2008
Personally, I'm still a fan of "applicaticataion", as pointed out a while back on TUAW: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/07/10/mac-101-spell-check-errors/
Though "cartigriqdge" is quite amusing too.
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Alex Blewitt said 12:55PM on 11-05-2008
I suspect the person writing it is an idiot. You can add words to your personal dictionary which you can spell (e.g. brand names, project names), and that's all that's happened here.
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Robert Palmer said 12:56PM on 11-05-2008
I know for a fact that I didn't add either of those two words to my dictionary, and I'd reckon that the other people in this thread haven't either.
Brad (aka CanSpice) said 5:08PM on 11-05-2008
Hi Alex,
I didn't add knswledgable to my dictionary, nor did the myriad others who see the bug. I've added other words (as you've said, project names and other such miscellany) but haven't added this one.
Patrick said 1:08PM on 11-05-2008
I wonder if applications can add words to the dictionary? Maybe that's why some of us (including myself) are seeing it and others are not. It could be we just all have some common application.
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Tony said 1:26PM on 11-05-2008
Could be, but I don't have a lot installed... it's a dev machine so it has remote desktop, it has wow, flip4mac, growl. Everything else is pretty much default that shipped with the machine.
plivesey said 1:13PM on 11-05-2008
Only turns up in the English dictionary for me, the British, Australian and Canadian dictionaries are fine.
To quickly change dictionaries in text edit go to Edit, Spelling and Grammar, Show Spelling and Grammar or Command-colon.
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BigB said 1:34PM on 11-05-2008
It only showed up for me if I misspelled it the way mentioned in the article.
if I spelled it knowlegable it didnt pop up the "kns" version.
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Sergio Bevilacqua said 2:03PM on 11-05-2008
In a related note, does anyone know how to turn off the auto-correct feature on the iPhone??? I usually type in both english and spanish, and it's driving me nuts when it auto-corrects all the time!!!!!! Sorry to change the subject...
Help!!!!!
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Christian Himmelsbach said 5:37PM on 11-05-2008
In the german version of Mac OS X (10.5.5) there are similar problems.
If i write a Text with Pages and the spell correction doesn't know the word i wrote, it sometimes offers words that seem to be build from syllables of words. But the result is definitely not a german word. :)
It's a bit strange.
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Misha said 9:34PM on 11-05-2008
You guys should really try typing in Russian on the iPhone. That thing just makes words up all the time. Hours of (mis)spelling fun.
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