Spelling, dictionaries, locales

With the introduction of word processors in the 1980s, spelling has become quite a bit easier, particularly with hard-to-spell languages such as English. Today, almost any app in which you type also includes a dictionary with standard words. As you type, the app shows misspelled words with a red underline.

If you work in a technical field with a specialized vocabulary, the chances are that some of the words you use are not in the app’s dictionary, so those words are marked as misspelled.

In the previous example, Musa is a technical term not in the standard English dictionary, but it is not misspelled. You can add technical words such as Musa to an auxiliary dictionary so that they are not marked as misspelled.

In addition, apps provide dictionaries for almost every language. If you are typing an article in Spanish, you can use the app’s Spanish dictionary, and add technical words to that dictionary as well.

Locales

In different parts of the world, there are differences in written communication—even within the same language. A date, number, or spelling may be different in one region compared to another.

Apps group customary presentations for spellings, numbers, dates, and currency symbols into locales—a language-country pair. In Brightspot, you can see all the available locales in your profile widget.

When you change the locale, Brightspot's widgets change to match the locale’s settings. In particular, Brightspot uses the locale’s dictionary for text you type.

Dictionary selection

The following diagram illustrates how Brightspot determines which dictionary to use as you type in the content edit form.

For example, if your locale is English (United Kingdom), Brightspot assumes that all the words you type are in the UK dictionary. If that dictionary is installed in Brightspot, spelling errors are caught accordingly. If that dictionary is not installed in Brightspot, your browser checks for spelling errors using its own dictionary.

(Dictionaries and spelling in browsers is a very complicated topic. Some browsers have dictionaries installed for several languages. Those browsers automatically detect in which language you are typing, and use the corresponding dictionary for spelling. If the browser cannot detect the language you are using, it may assume you are using a default dictionary and mark every word as misspelled, or it may not perform spell check at all. See your browser’s user guide for information about how it checks spelling.)

Detecting misspelled words

Your version of Brightspot may have several language dictionaries installed as well as auxiliary dictionaries with technical terms for those languages. The following diagram illustrates the logic Brightspot uses to detect misspelled words among all those dictionaries.

For example, you are working in the English-Australia locale, and you type I saw the movie Breaker Morant.

1. Brightspot looks in the standard English-Australia dictionary, and does not find the word Morant.
2. Brightspot then looks in the auxiliary dictionary for English-Australia (if you created one), and again does not find the word Morant.

In this case, Brightspot marks the word Morant as misspelled.