Microsoft Word does badly against the National Spelling Bee joint champions.
The Scripps US National Spelling Bee is over for another year with unprecedented joint winners Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe. Congratulations to both winners who were commendably gracious while sharing the trophy.
Like last year, we were interested in seeing how the spell-check dictionaries supplied with Microsoft Word would cope with the words correctly spelled by these amazing people. Word did better than in 2013 but still would have failed long before the final rounds.
Here’s how the list appears in Word 2013 with the US or UK English dictionaries for spell-checking.
Only one word ‘Buddha’ immediately came up as correctly spelled. Eight other words had blue squiggly lines when in all lower case letters. We right-clicked on each of these and selected the Capital case suggested alternative (e.g. Cahier or Chalybeate) to get the error cleared.
There were no differences in the results between US English and UK English dictionaries, as you can see. The Australian English dictionary had one different result – plumbeous was identified as a correct spelling right away. Not sure why that is, since plumbeous isn’t in common usage down under.
Here’s the plain word list, compiled from the final round results for the joint winners.
Aeschylean
antigropelos
augenphilologie
Backstein
bagwyn
Buddha
Cahier
carabao
Chalybeate
Characin
corpsbruder
criollismo
croquignole
ctenoid
dactylion
détraqué
Encaenia
encastage
favus
feijoada
Feuilleton
gemeinschaft
hexerei
holluschick
Hyblaean
lamentabile
laulau
lotophagi
nocifensor
Ormolu
oxygnathous
paixtle
plumbeous
Quatrefoil
sdrucciola
semmel
skandhas
Stichomythia
terreplein
thymelici
See Also
- Making Word compatible with George R. R. Martin
- A Westeros dictionary for Word
- Showing Language setting in Word
- Office ScreenTips in other languages
- Kardashian in Office 2013
- Exclusion dictionary – follow-up
- Removing words from the Word dictionary
- Word needs a Latin dictionary
- Language and Dictionaries in MS Word
- Why is an eighth grader smarter than Microsoft Word?
- Do you help Microsoft’s proofing tools?
- Side-by-Side Translation in Word
- Language support in Microsoft Office
- Which languages in your copy of Office?
- Adding repeating words or phrases to the custom dictionary
- Office 2007 dictionary updates
