You can configure OS X to use multiple spelling dictionaries. In different languages supported by OS X and user supplied dictionaries.

Sounds great. And it mostly works.

Learned something today. That “mostly” has limits.

I do most of my fic writing using a text editor called TextWrangler. Sort of a baby/lite version of BBEdit. Quite a few features considering the cost (free). For straight writing on a Mac? I think it’s one of the best.

If I want to use a “real” word processor (with fancy page formatting, etc.) I have Pages, a part of iWork. (I don’t use Pages very often yet. (Might change if I buy an iPad.) I rarely need a word processor — when I do I’m usually at work and I use MS Word.). I’ve tried assorted versions of Open Office but it just feels “clumsy” to me.

So… I have TextWrangler set to spell-check as I type. It normally works well. Speeds up the misspelled word finding. Doesn’t help with homophones, or other grammar issues. Or wrong words caused by typing errors. (e.g. In a fic  I used ‘Hoe’ instead of ‘How’ in a sentence.)

It was pointed out to me the other day, that I spelled a word wrong – I spelled ‘panicking’ without the ‘k’. I corrected it and then tried to figure out why TextWrangler didn’t flag it as misspelled (Because it was acting as if it were correctly spelled and I couldn’t convince it otherwise. But if I looked for a definition for it in the dictionary, there wasn’t one.).

So, I stuffed ‘panicing’ into Pages and it correctly told me it was misspelled.

So then I played around with the spelling settings in OS X. And noticed that it was configured to use a LOT more dictionaries than I remember setting. Not just English. But also Russian, Germany, Polish, Japanese, etc. And I started turning off dictionaries. And found the problem.

When Dutch was one of the languages being used for spell checking, TextWrangler accepts ‘panicing’ but Pages doesn’t.  (Not sure if panicing is the actual spelling of a Dutch word.)But they both use the same dictionary setting, so how’d it happen? No idea but there must be something different in how they actually use the dictionaries. Maybe they use them in a different order?

No idea, but at least it is fixed now.