Office 2007 has many subtle updates in the dictionary.
There’s many subtle updates in the dictionary for Office 2007. The team is boasting that they’ve added some 58,000 words to the default dictionary.
More names
They’ve taken the US census data and added the more popular first names to the dictionary. Microsoft gives examples like Brianne and Carmela as additions as well as Carolyn (which I thought was already in regular use).
More place names
Microsoft has added a lot more places names to their dictionary especially for Australia and South Africa. That means places like Koolyanobbing might finally not get the red squiggly line in the final release.
More proper names
Microsoft plundered the data from user defined dictionaries made in the Office 2007 beta plus the massive store of custom dictionaries on Hotmail to improve the list of proper names. So now Word will approve of names like Verizon and WorldCom.
“Words added include names (Kyla, Kaitlin, Grinch, Jolie), companies (Mozilla, PeopleSoft), products (Celebrex, Percocet),and newly inflected words (homeschooling, scrapbooking, texted).”
Other additions to the proper names include:
- Native American governmental units
- Official UN countries
- Names of all the languages supported by Microsoft.
-
Capital cities and major cities
More Aussie words
Amazingly ‘Emu’ currently gets a spelling error, even in the current Beta 2 TR version of Office 2007! But ‘Emus’ is OK. Go figure.
That’s fixed plus many other Australian words are added after a concerted effort from the Sydney office of Microsoft.
Repeated Repeated words identified
Normally Word will flag the same word twice as a problem (with a red squiggle). As part of the dictionary upgrade there will be more exceptions for proper names like Bora Bora.
Repeated words is very common in Australian place names derived from Aboriginal languages such as Wagga Wagga, Baw Baw, Curl Curl, Gin Gin, Kin Kin, Lang Lang, Mia Mia, Mooney Mooney, Nar Nar, Obi Obi, Wangi Wangi and Wirra Wirra.
Repeating a word in Aboriginal dialects indicates a plural so ‘Wagga’ means ‘Crow’ and ‘Wagga Wagga‘ means ‘place of many crows’.
See Also
- Microsoft Word vs. Spelling Bee champions 2014
- iPhone blocked spellings in Word
- Why is an eighth grader smarter than Microsoft Word?
- Spell-checker pulps cookbook
- Klingon = Clinton
- Word’s problem with a possessive Donna
- The Cheese Shop and Microsoft Word
- Palin isn’t in the Word dictionary
