I’m constantly finding little gems in Mac OS X that make my life easier and make me love the Mac even more every day. Recently, I realized that you can automatically spellcheck in just about any program in OS X. This is especially great when writing blog entries and emails in Safari. I no longer need to copy and paste my text into a word processor in order to check my spelling. I can type right in any text box and if I make a mistake, it gets underlined in red just like in my word processor. I can even right-click (yes, I have 2 buttons on my mouse) and get spelling suggestions.
To turn this feature on, simply go to the Edit menu, then to Spelling and click on “Check Spelling as You Type”. Crazy easy. You can do this in most apps. Some programs are missing this function, most notably the Firefox browser.
If you want to take it a step further, you can also spellcheck in other languages. Thanks to great open source software and the UNIX base that OS X is built on, Anton Leuski was able to build cocoAspell. With cocoAspell, you can spellcheck just about any language on your Mac.
Is there any way on OS X to use different dictionaries for different purposes?
There are words I’d like to flag in some contexts but not in others. For example,
* abbreviations known by only a limited audience
* words I use in a colloquial but not a formal context
* words I only want to use when writing for a specialized audience (e.g., “dialect”. Many people find this word to be offensive, but to linguists it is a neutral word. I refer to my own speech as a dialect.)
* words that only a well-educated audience would understand