Microsoft Word knows more slang than you might expect. Words like zillion, jillion, squillion, gazillion, bazillion, and oodles are all recognized as correct spellings in Word’s US English dictionary, so you won’t get the dreaded red squiggly line if you drop one into a document. Word’s thesaurus even offers alternatives for “zillion,” though some of […]
Every year after the Scripps National Spelling Bee, we test the winning and finalist words against Microsoft Word’s spell checker to see how many get the dreaded red squiggly line. In 2026, Word had its worst performance ever, recognizing just 4 out of 21 words correctly for US, UK, and Australian English. A group of […]
Microsoft Word has not gone ‘woke’. Despite press stories claiming Word enforces ‘politically correct’ language, the truth is far less dramatic. The Inclusiveness grammar checks behind the headlines are optional, off by default, and have been part of Word since before 2020. They flag words like mankind, postman and showgirl with a purple squiggly line […]
Microsoft Word 365 has a new overpaste feature that turns selected text into a clickable hyperlink in a single paste, no dialog box required. Instead of pressing Ctrl + K, pasting the URL, and clicking OK, you can now copy a link, highlight the text you want to convert, and paste straight over it. The […]
Microsoft has quietly added a “Move to ribbon” option to the much hated Copilot Dynamic Access Button in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, after a wave of customer complaints about the floating button cluttering every document, workbook and slide deck. The fix gives paying Microsoft 365 customers a way to push Copilot back where it belongs […]
