See what happens when Microsoft Word meets the words of 2017

It’s time again to see how Microsoft Word’s spell checker goes against the newest words in the English-speaking world.

We’ve taken the “Word of the Year” from various dictionaries plus some other 2017 contenders and typed them in Word to see if the red squiggle appears.

We used Word 2016 for Windows and Mac with Office 365 at mid Dec. 2017, both gave the same spelling results.

Word does quite well this year, partly because half the terms are already in the dictionary like ‘feminism’ and ‘complicit’.

‘Antifa’ was probably NOT in the Word dictionary at the start of 2017, but it is now.

These days, the Word dictionary is updated a lot more often than a decade ago. ‘Click to Run’ allows Microsoft to push out updates to Office more often.  That’s not always a good thing, but it’s great for updating the dictionary.

Office 2013

Here’s how the same word list fared in Office 2013 for Windows.  Surprisingly, ‘Kompromat’ didn’t get a red squiggly.