Spelling (and editing) have never been my strengths. I’m smart enough to be a good speller but my mind races well past the speed at which I’m able to type and get thoughts down. So I rely very heavily on spell checkers in email and word processing software, and just go back and edit the words underlined in red by the spell checker.
It’s not unusual for Microsoft’s spell checker in Word and Outlook to come up blank for a word I’ve misspelled. My remedy? Do a Google search using my cobbled together, hacked up, misspelled word. More often than not, Google will come back with…
Did you mean: [correctly spelled word].
I wrote this blog post after butchering the word, practitioner. My fat fingers hacked out, practioner. The Microsoft spell checker suggested fractioned. Nope, not what I had in mind. I realized my mistake of not having the -it- in the middle of the word, but I checked Google just to see if Google would know what I meant. I put practioner into the Google search bar and, whalah, at the top of the search results appears…
If Google can figure out the spelling, without the context of sentence structure and nearby words, why can’t Microsoft’s spell checker?
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