Correct your spelling & grammar

You can see misspellings or grammatical errors as you type and change your autocorrect settings with Google Docs.

To help Google Docs find misspellings and grammatical errors, set your language. Click File and then Language, then choose your language.

Check spelling & grammar

You can check your spelling and grammar, then accept or ignore the corrections.

  1. Open a document in Google Docs.
  2. In the top left, click Spell Check Spell check. A box will open in the top right corner.
    • To use a suggestion, click Change.
    • To ignore a suggestion, click Ignore.
    • To accept or ignore all suggestions, click More More  and then Accept all or Ignore all.

If you have spelling and grammar suggestions turned on, misspelled words are underlined in red, and grammar suggestions are underlined in blue. Learn how to turn suggestions on or off. 

To quickly accept or ignore the corrections: 

  1. Right-click the red or blue underline. 
    • To accept the suggestion, click the edited word. 
    • To ignore the suggestion, click Ignore.
    • To report an incorrect suggestion, click Feedback on suggestion.
Add a word to your spelling suggestions dictionary

You can add words to the dictionary so Docs doesn't identify them as misspelled.

  1. Open a document in Google Docs.
  2. In the top left, click Spell Check Spell check. A box will open in the top right corner.
  3. To add a word that appears in the spell checker to the dictionary, click Add to dictionary.
Remove a word from your dictionary

You can remove a word from your dictionary.

  1. Open the document in Google Docs.
  2. Right-click the word.
  3. Select Remove from personal dictionary.

Turn off autocorrect

To turn off automatic substitutions, capitalization, smart quotes, and list or link detection:

  1. Open a document in Google Docs.
  2. Click Tools and then Preferences.
  3. To turn off certain auto corrections, like automatic capitalization or link detection, uncheck the box next to the function.
    • To turn off certain auto substitutions, uncheck the box next to the word.
    • To delete the auto substitution, next to the word, click Remove Remove.
  4. Click OK.
Correct a word's spelling

To always correct a specific word's spelling: 

  1. Right-click on the word. 
  2. Click Always correct to [word].
Undo an automatic correction
  1. After the word is corrected, hover your cursor over the word. 
  2. Click Undo or Turn off to permanently turn off that type of correction.
Turn suggestions on or off

Misspelled words are underlined in red.To turn spelling suggestions off:

  1. Open a document in Google Docs.
  2. Click Tools and then Spelling and then Underline errors.
  3. The check mark will disappear to show that it is off.

Note: This will turn suggestions on or off for all of your documents. 

About machine learning

Spelling suggestions are powered by machine learning. As language understanding models use billions of common phrases and sentences to automatically learn about the world, they can also reflect human cognitive biases. Being aware of this is a good start, and the conversation around how to handle it is ongoing. Google is committed to making products that work well for everyone, and are actively researching unintended bias and mitigation strategies.

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