Fed up with Microsoft Word’s refusal to fix “accidently”? You’re not imagining things—Word’s spellchecker lets this typo slip through. If you want to finally solve the “accidently” vs “accidentally” debate, you’ve come to the right place.
Office Watch reader Steve D. noticed something strange in the Microsoft Word dictionary. According to Word ‘accidently’ is a word, but it’s not.
As you can see, the same error appears in US, UK and Australian English. We’ll look at the Grammar suggestion for US English in a moment.
‘Accidently’ is usually considered a misspelling of ‘Accidentally’ but major dictionaries concede that it’s such a common mistake that both spellings could be acceptable.
Oxford English Dictionary lists both however “Accidentally” is a lot more common with 4 occurrences per million words compared with just 0.2 per million for “Accidently”.
Mirriam-Webster says “we do have sufficient evidence of accidently in use to include it in our dictionaries. But it is far less common than accidentally, and it is frequently criticized as an error.”
It seems Microsoft has decided to accept both spellings, perhaps just to avoid complaints from customers.
Fix Word’s spelling mistake with the Exclusion Dictionary
There’s a way to remove any word from the Microsoft Word
Word has a little known Exclusion Dictionary which lets you override the in-built and custom dictionaries.
You can fix Microsoft’s “accidently” mistake by adding the word to the plain text file. In this example ExcludeDictionaryEN0409.lex for US English.
See our detailed coverage of the Word Exclusion Dictionary. for more details including where the exclusion file is located.
It’s spelling mistake not grammar
‘accidently’ in Word gets a little stranger because it can show as a grammar error not spelling but, in our tests, only for US English.
Word says “An adverb works better here” then suggests the correct spelling.
It seems the grammar system knows that ‘accidentally’ is the more common spelling while the spell checker has the two spellings included.
Microsoft is many things, but the company is not the final arbiter on language. There’s plenty of grey areas in English that reasonable people can disagree about.
How to remove words from the Word dictionary
More uses for the Office Exclusion Dictionary
Discover more in Word’s spelling corrections
2025 Spelling Bee champs vs Microsoft Word
