How to get InDesign to flag a word as misspelled

Question

I had a document that I ran spell check on and it worked as expected. When I went through and proofread the document however, spell check didn't flag the word "harwood" which was supposed to be "hardwood" in my doc. Is there a way that I can get InDesign to flag "harwood" as a misspelled word?

Mike Witherell · Accepted Answer

Make sure of a few things:Is your text controlled by paragraph styles wherein the style defines the language for the spell-checker to use?In Preferences > Dictionary set to Hunspell? This is a better dictionary than the Proximity version.Under Edit > Spelling > User Dictionary, is harwood entered in as a removed word?

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

Noting the prior answers — well, we've been calling them spall chuckers in my circle for around forty years. 🙂

I am not sure to what extent InDesign's checking is rule-based, rather than dictionary-based; I know Word uses rules to a large extent, which gives it flexibility but not infrequently passes words like "harwood."

My problem with spall chucking is "wrong words" — words that pass a spell check but are the wrong one in context. I have a book I have updated and carefully proofed multiple times; it was only on the most recent update that I noticed a longstanding sentence (in a noncritical passsage, at least) had 'is' swapped for 'an,' which passed a quick read and a spell check but made total hash of the sense. Even grammy chonkers don't always catch those.

Maybe AI will free us of the whole problem forever and evert.

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