Spell checking

If the program ispell has been installed on your system, then you may use it to check your text for misspelled words by pressing M-$ or Edit→Spell. Notice that you might have to verify that the dictionaries corresponding to the languages in which your texts have been written have been installed on your system; this is usually the case for English.

When you launch the spell checker (either on the whole text or a selected region), you will be prompted at each misspelled word and the footer displays the available options:

a)

Accepts the misspelled word and all its future occurrences in the text.

r)

Replace the misspelled word by a correction you have to enter.

i)

Indicate that the “misspelled” word is actually correct and that it has to be inserted in your personal dictionary.

1-9)

Several suggested corrections for your misspelled word.

Notice that ispell just checks for misspelled words. No grammatical faults will be detected.

When starting the spell checker, it will use the dictionary of the language which is active at the current cursor position (or the start of a selection). Only text in that language will be checked for. If your document contains text in several languages, then you will have to launch the spell checker once for each language being used.