Filed under: Software, Tips and tricks, Snow Leopard
Unsung Snow Leopard feature: multiple-language spell checker
OS X has had a system-wide, built-in spell checker for a while now, but until Snow Leopard, it could only check the spelling of whatever your default language was. But what if you needed to prepare a document in another language, say for a college Spanish assignment? In that case, you'd end up with a document with pretty much every single word underlined in red, with no reliable way to spell check it.But now, OS X offers simultaneous spell checking not only in four different varieties of English, but also in Spanish, French, German, Italian, and six other European languages. You can mix and match these languages in a single document, and the built-in spell checker will intelligently adapt to whichever language it thinks you've switched to. Pages from iWork '07 doesn't seem to benefit from this new feature, nor does the 2008 version of Word, but it works just fine in Safari and TextEdit. With TextEdit you get an added feature: once it figures out what language you're typing in, autocorrect will work for that language just as well as it does for English.
So, for example, when you write in Spanish, the computer's dictionary knows it has to look for words in Spanish.
Or, if you'll forgive mi español descompuesto,
Entonces, por ejemplo, cuando tú escribes en español, el diccionario de la computadora sabe que tiene mirar por palabras en español.
That last sentence would normally have red underlines under nearly every word, but using TextEdit in Snow Leopard the spell checker adapted to Spanish spelling as soon as I finished typing "entonces." It also auto-corrected espanol to español, which is much easier than having to type option-n, n to get the tilde above the n.
The adaptation seems to happen on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. In other words, the spell checker doesn't seem to be intelligent enough to recognize when you switch languages in mid-paragraph, much less mid-sentence. The spell checker will do its best to figure out the primary language of the paragraph; for example, if you type a few words in English but the rest of the paragraph is in Spanish, the English words will show up as misspelled.
There's some potential for confusion if you switch back and forth between languages within paragraphs, but between paragraphs there's no apparent issues.
This would have come in really handy a couple of years ago; after opening some old Spanish assignments I had, I found some of my compositions riddled with minor errors (mostly misplaced accent marks) that the spell checker in Leopard or Tiger never would have caught.
¡Viva la Mac!
View the video below for a brief glimpse of the new spell check behavior in action:
View the video below for a brief glimpse of the new spell check behavior in action:
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
liuping said 11:20AM on 9-04-2009
This is a huge feature in dual language households.
It used to drive my wife crazy when she was emailing her friends and relatives in Spanish and the screen was covered in red underline.
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Simon said 5:08AM on 9-05-2009
There was already a solution to this problem in every OS X release since 10.2 maybe.
In the spell checker palette instead of selecting a language you select 'Multilingual'. OS X then automatically recognizes what language you're typing in and corrects accordingly.
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David said 11:40AM on 9-04-2009
I used to switch between my native language (Danish) and English all the time. This is really a huge improvement to me!
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mex said 10:04AM on 9-07-2009
same for me switching all the time English - Italian... and my wife is Latvian! :D
Brian said 11:43AM on 9-04-2009
i have yet to upgrade to snow leopard, i plan on doing it when i get a chance to get to an apple store, but what i want to know is what languages it supports. You mention "six other European languages" but what are they? I use English and Spanish lots for work and Im an avid Russian typer when i communicate with my friends and some co-workers. It would be a god send for me to have a Russian spell check in snow leopard. I think if the iphone can (attempt to) do it so can snow leopard right?
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daan.de.vries said 4:59AM on 9-05-2009
Russian spelling, it supports!
tukan said 11:51AM on 9-04-2009
I found this feature accidentally couple of days ago and I absolutely love it. However, while it works well when I change to Spanish, it doesn't do so well, when I try typing in Polish, my native language. I've tried guiding it by disabling all other languages in the spelling menu (so leaving only English, Spanish and Polish), but it remains clueless. Oh well.
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acidscan said 11:51AM on 9-04-2009
Your Spanish is really "descompuesto" but you are getting there :)
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Miriam said 11:58AM on 9-04-2009
I don't know how to do this. Can someone please spell it out (!) step by step?
I would like to use it in TextEdit but it only corrected one word. What needs to be set up and how? Thank you!
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Kev orng said 12:03PM on 9-04-2009
Hallelujah, I can't wait to see if the Canadian English actually works this time.
Just when I think i've taught it favour and favourite, it comes along and puts a red line under favours.
And although you can't see it, sure enough it did exactly that.
At least it's not like the bad old days of Panther where choosing Canadian English resulted in remapping my keyboard to French Canadian.
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prufrock said 12:03PM on 9-04-2009
This is great. English, French and Portuguese -- all at the same time now. :) I switched often enough that I learned the hotkey for the spelling dialog -- so happy to see this improved.
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SpookyET said 12:39PM on 9-04-2009
You can install your own dictionaries. You can unpack Mozilla Firefox dictionaries. They are zip files with xpi extensions and drop the .aff and .dic files in ~/Library/Spelling. The problem is that they suck. We need better dictionaries. I also think that they are just for spell check, not grammar.
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bayxsonic said 12:09PM on 9-04-2009
Yeah, I noticed that today... it kept auto-correcting "sata" in "asta" ("auction" in Italian) even though my system is in US English. I had to manually delete the S from asta and add it to the beginning, because rewriting the word would just make it auto-correct again.
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bayxsonic said 12:12PM on 9-04-2009
Edit: I was using TextEdit
loser said 12:26PM on 9-04-2009
You can also load an external dictionary not included in the defaults. Tried it with a Greek dictionary and it works lovely. It's a huge thing for not native-english speaking users and maybe the best reason i moved to SL.
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Michael Salmon said 12:53PM on 9-04-2009
Leopard had a multilingual spell checker which worked well for me. Not that this isn't better just not that much better.
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RuiPereira said 12:55PM on 9-04-2009
Hummm, and how come is this different (apart from the possibility to order your preferred language list), from the "'Multilingual" option in the "Spelling and Grammar" window, available in OSX for at least 3 years now? (http://plesslweb.ch/2006/09/07/multilingual-spellchecking-in-os-x/)
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dronkert said 12:56PM on 9-04-2009
This is not new. Leopard had it, too, although not accessible from System Preferences. See for example http://allforces.com/2008/05/08/multiple-language-spellchecking/
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Ben said 1:02PM on 9-04-2009
Hmm. Pages '09 already had this feature. You just select which language you're typing in in the Text pane of the Document Inspector. Voila. Red squigglies go away.
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Gareth said 2:42PM on 9-04-2009
I've been using multi-lingual spell checking for years.
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