Spell Checking in WordPress

When I put up my first WordPress blog about a year ago, I often had to go back and edit posts for grammatical and spelling errors. The grammatical errors could be greatly reduced if I had just spent a little more time and effort proofreading my posts.

The spelling errors on the other hand would unfortunately take much more effort to catch and correct. I admit it — I’m just a piss-poor speller and the older I get, the worse it seems to get. I’d really be lost without the MS Word spell checker, which saves me considerable embarrassment in both document creation and email writing. There isn’t a tool yet that can save me from the embarrassment of what I actually write, but that doesn’t really bother me as much.

Being the complete noob to WP, I was scratching my head wishing there was a plug in for WP to do spell checking. It seemed like there was a plug in for just about anything else you could possibly dream of for WP, so surely there must be a slew of them for spell checking. Right? It would only stand to reason.

I did a search and started to get discouraged rather quickly. It seems that a spell check plug in doesn’t really exist. There was mention of one and I even attempted to install it, but then nothing. It appeared to install, but the icon for the spell checker never showed on the editor toolbar. At this point, I was getting resigned to just making posts loaded with spelling errors.

However, I don’t give up easily, so I continued to search. And search… It was then that I found a blog (sorry don’t remember who you are, but thanks a lot for the great tip), where the blogger mentioned the same problem I was confronting about the lack of a decent spell checker plug in for WP. So what was his solution?

Use the spell checking feature of the Google Toolbar!

I thought this was brilliant! Since I had the Google Toolbar already installed in both IE7 and Firefox I opened up my WP admin console and proceeded to write a new post. When I was finished, I clicked on the “Check” icon on the Google Toolbar and voila! It highlighted a whole bunch of my spelling mistakes in red. You then have the option to edit the highlighted words, ignore them, or add them to the spell checker’s dictionary. I was thinking how cool is that?!

What’s more, I now use the spell checker on the Google Toolbar to check all my forum posts before submitting them. Of course, it doesn’t prevent me from making the occasional boneheaded post.

Now let me wrap up this post and go spell check it!

Get the Google Toolbar for IE here:

Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer

Get it for Firefox here:

Google Toolbar for Firefox