Spell Check Marking Capitalized Words as Misspelled

I am writing because I have a very large word document at my office and when I see a word needing the first letter capitalized, I delete the letter and retype it capitalized. Spell check then recognizes the remainder of the word as misspelled. It does not red-underline the first letter though. If you try the correct option, it will place the correct word in after the letter you added.

For example:

• november – I would erase the ‘n’ place a ‘N’ and the ‘ovember’ would then be underlined as being misspelled! It is maddening!

I have other word documents which do not do this, but I could not find any differences in the settings.

Please help me!

Many Kind Thanks,

— Submitted by Rachel from California

ANSWER:

This is very strange and I’ve never heard of a problem like this.

I found a recent discussion in the Microsoft Word forums about this exact problem. There was no definitive answer, but the proofing language was mentioned.

Based on that idea, here is something to try:

1. On the Review tab, click Language > Set Proofing Language
2. Press Ctrl + A to select the entire document
3. Click English US (or whichever language you need)
4. Click OK

Notes: If you ALWAYS want to use that particular language, click Set As Default. If you copy and paste portions of documents from other sources, deselect Detect Language Automatically. This will prevent Microsoft Word from trying to use two different proofing languages in the same document.

Another thing you can try, if you haven’t done so already, is to clear all of the previous spelling checks in that document.

I will be interested to hear if resetting the proofing language fixes the problem.

Comments

(Comments are from a previous commenting system. Please add to the discussion using the comment box at the end of the page.)

resetting the proofing language worked!
by: Rachel

Well we had this problem in two of our major documents and it turns out one had the language set to ‘French’ and the other had the language set to ‘Italian’! Nobody here knows why this occurred or if it will happen again. I Did both of the things you suggested just to be sure I was covering all of my bases.
1. I ‘checked the document’ under ‘proofing’
2. and then set the language to ‘English (US)’ and then selected the entire document and re-selected ‘English (US)’ and then selected ‘English (US)’ as the default.
3. I then went through the document and did spellcheck and added words that are chemistry constituents to the dictionary.
4. I then tried making the first letter of a word in the middle of a sentence a capital to see if it allowed me to do that without recognizing it as being misspelled, & it worked!!!!Yipppppie! The whole office is rejoicing & singing Hallelujah to you! Thanks for your help! Many kind thanks to you Sue & hopefully this will be helpful in the future!
Thanks,
Rachel

---