#396 – Pronounced

Most everything on my computers that has a text entry system also has some sort of built in spell checker. They are sometimes a little limited. I use google a lot to double check a lot of “misspelled” words. It’s usually a case of a word that dictionaries doen’t know about yet but is used by people every day.

Tags: , ,

12 thoughts on “#396 – Pronounced”

  1. Ziggy Stardust says:

    Since I lost my smartphone I’ve resorted to using an actual, bound dictionary much of the time. It’s kind of disorienting, not to mention rather useless if you need to know how to spell something.

  2. Falos says:

    Will kids be better at spelling? I could close my eyes and pick any random youtube comment…

  3. kingklash says:

    What with all the TV Lawyer ads out and about, you think the doc would know the word.

  4. Justin says:

    Being Canadian makes this one tough. My spell check doesn’t like the extra U’s we use (use we u’s? u’s we u’s? use we use?)

    Example: colour, favourite, doughnut, armour, behaviour, etc.

    Hono(u)rable mention to the re’s instead of er’s, such as calibre and centre.

    1. mcnamara12 says:

      Justin, if you go into the spell check settings, you should be able to change it from American English to Canadian English. That should fix the problem with u’s.

      I always run into trouble because I frequently have to type equations or science words that spell check doesn’t recognize. It took me forever to convince my computer that I was actually talking about the square root of minus 1, and not about myself. (stupid autocorrect)

      1. pbarnrob says:

        -or if you’re talking about electronics, it’s ‘j’, since ‘i’ is already used (for instantaneous current).
        And watch out for Google. If you ask for something commonly misspelled, it’ll happily find you all the instances of the oops, and maybe later, the right way. Trust, but Verify!

  5. J. G. says:

    Doen’t?

  6. Yeah, it’s always eerie when my vocabulary is better than a dictionary’s…even if it is a spell-check dictionary.

  7. Jordan says:

    The cool thing is that Google doesn’t uses a dictionary, it uses crawled sites. So eventually, once everybody uses Google to spell check, our language will degrade. 😉

    1. das-g says:

      Not necessarily. Like each feedback loop, it might either diverge entirely or it might converge to a stable equilibrium. (If there’s enough damping. If not, it might get into self-repeating sequences. One decade you’ll spell a word one way, the next decade another way, then a third way and then it starts all over gain. Maybe with a bit of chaotic oscillation added in. Repeating over and over again, just not exactly, similar to how fashion does. Spellin’ iz like phahtion, U sea. 0R VV1II 63, 3/3||7you4II3why.)

  8. reynard61 says:

    That reminds me of the time that my mom tried looking up a medical term that had been created in the early 1990s in a 1970s-era medical dictionary.

  9. kingklash says:

    If you use the alphabet from “On Beyond Zebra”, you make your computer worry.

Leave a Reply to Justin Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *