It's not a new realization I've made, but I felt like it's one I need to post. The revelization that should have been revealed already by the title is that Google is way better at checking my spelling than any other spellchecker I've tried. When I write posts like this one, I use a FireFox spellcheck plugin to rinse through common typos. It commonly highlights words that it doesn't recognize in red, some of them completely valid words, such as the word banderoles. There are also words that are apparently not valid, such as as FireFox, spellcheck & plugin. Then, most importantly, it highlights words with a typo in them, or words that I just can't spell, such as aquintense. If I right click aquintense for a list of verbular alternatives I get quintessence and insensate... not really what I was looking for.
If, however, I type the word in a Google search, the small notification: "Did you mean acquaintance?" pops up above the results, along with a couple of other similar alternatives (aquinese and acquittance, also completely new alternatives). If I click the correctly spelled version of the word I meant I even get a definition of the word, short and simple. Like this:
- A person's knowledge or experience of something.
- One's slight knowledge of or friendship with someone.
So far Google has recognized everything the spellcheck plugin has failed at. I've tried the 'After the Deadline' plugin developed by WordPress staff as well, and a few standalone spellcheckers, but none of them do a really good job. A last resort that does work, and manages to find not only typographical but also grammatical errors, is Microsoft Word. Open Office? Star Office? Yadda yadda? Nope, they don't do the job at all. Wish Google could stuff all their amazing spellchecking functionality into an easy to use plugin for the browser, but wait, maybe that already exists with Chrome?
If it does, that might mean I finally found a reason to switch. If not, I'll keep hoping, maybe someday this dream will become a reality!
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