I spend a lot of my time in the Google World and it is generally a warm and helpful place to exist online. Lately, I’ve discovered Google Docs has a big issue with the way I spell things. Google Docs Spell Check appears to now hate any sort of “hyphenation” and my olde timey Germanic-skool way of tending to spell some compound words as one — but with capitalization in the middle of the word, like say, “HandShape” or “FingerSpelling.”
Here’s the blurp from the Google Docs website explaining the intention of their Spell Check:
You can use Google Docs spell check — enabled by default — to find misspelled words and see suggested spellings. Words with spelling suggestions are automatically underlined in red. Simply right-click an underlined word to see the suggested correction and replace the misspelled word.
Google Docs uses contextual spelling suggestions (currently available for English only) to try to figure out which words you meant to type based on the content in your document. Sometimes we’ll even make suggestions for valid dictionary words if we think it’s much more likely that you meant to use a different word.
Here are some of the words that Google Spell Check insists I change. Google wants “anti-viral” to become “antiviral” and “curve ball” to be “curveball” and “FingerSpelling” to become “fingerspelling” and that’s all just in one writing session!
In my brief history with Google Spell Check, I can absolutely confirm if you hyphenate any two words, Google will want you to make it a single word. I’m not sure if I like that sort of overlord dictation from my ubiquitous Spell Checker, but I admit I usually just let Google make the wanted changes because they must have some sort of insider notion about what is common practice and, as you surely know by now, it never makes any sense to try to fight The Goog. Oh, and in Spell Checking this article in Google Docs, Google wants to change “Goog” to “Good.” Let it be known!