One of the most annoying parts of editing using any browser is the spellcheck. I have noticed that suggestions offered by them at times are confusing. For example, a URL is not a spelling mistake, but the open-source proofing tool available in Edge or Chrome for spell checking does that. Microsoft Edge is changing this annoyance by switching to Windows Spellcheck.
Microsoft Edge or all Chromium browser now supports Windows Spellcheck. Any word added to the custom dictionary of Windows 10 will be available in the browser.
Enable Windows Spellcheck in Microsoft Edge
Windows Spellcheck is not new. The suggestion that shows up in Microsoft products like Microsoft Word is because of Windows Spellcheck. It has been there since Windows 8.1 Switching to native spellchecking provides a variety of advantages such as additional language support, shared custom dictionary, and no more marking of website URL, acronyms, and email addresses.
While Microsoft Edge enables this by default, you can always configure the language settings. Click on the three-dot menu on the top right of Microsoft Edge, and then Settings from the menu. Click on Languages, and notice the Check Spelling section.
Enable the spell check by toggling on the for the respective language. Edge will automatically enable it for the default language. If you wish to allow for additional languages, you can first add them under the languages section of Edge, and then toggle on spell check for that language.
To make sure you are taking full advantage of the Windows Spellcheck native integration, you should install the same language in Windows as well.
Navigate to Windows Settings > Time and Language > Add a preferred language.
If the necessary language pack is not available, Edge will use the default spell checker available for Chromium.
It is interesting to know that this feature is a result of a collaboration between Google and Microsoft engineers in the Chromium project. The credit goes to Guillaume Jenkins and Rouslan Solomakhin (Google), and Bruce Long, Luis Sanchez Padilla, and Siye Liu (Microsoft) for getting this done. That said, this feature will be enabled for Chrome as well or any other browser which is using Chromium.
How is the Windows Custom Dictionary supported?
It is essential that we talk about this and how it works. Microsoft Edge and Windows Custom Dictionary are shared. If you add a word using Edge, then it will be included in the Windows Custom Dictionary.
You can manually check if the word was included by opening the default.dic file located at %appdata%\Microsoft\Spelling.
While the words you add from outside Edge is not visible, but they will be an exception from spellcheck. Any word you add from Edge can be removed from Edge. The same will apply to all Chromium browsers.
If you work on Windows most of the time dealing with documents, and editing, this is going to be super useful.
Windows users will not have to maintain or import custom words to the browser anymore. If it is added as an exception from anywhere in Windows, itwill be available in the Edge browser.
