Firefox spell check: Help for Wisconsin’s poor spellers

by Mark Czerniec | November 11, 2009 | 0 comments

Spell check in Firefox browser

Perhaps there is poor spelling everywhere, and I’m just more conscious of it in my fellow Wisconsinites.

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Whatever the reason, it sometimes seems like you can’t read a single comment at the Journal Times or the Racine Post or JT Irregulars without smacking your brain into two or three clumsy errors which could have been caught by a simple spell-checker.

Here’s a tip: Get Firefox.

Not only is Firefox a superior, free browser with an superabundance of useful add-ons, but it has a built-in spell-checker which flags your suspected misspellings with a dotted red underline.

The spell-check feature works right inside the text area boxes where you normally compose comments — but you can also perform a simple hack which adds it to all one-line text fields as well.

Using Firefox, you merely hold the Control key and click inside any form’s text areas to activate spell-checking, see suggested spellings, or add correctly spelled words to your personal dictionary. (Should you ever need to edit that dictionary, search for a file named “persdict.dat” and use an ordinary text editor like Notepad or TextEdit.)

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Just imagine how much more credible your Bigfoot sighting reports and civic cynicism will seem with correct spelling. Now, if only we had a handy grammar-checker to distinguish “your” from “you’re,” “who’s” from “whose,” and “it’s” from “its.”