h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Meglasoft's Word suggests "Bradford and Bengali" in place of "Bradford and Bingley". A jolly little jest.

Any others ?

I have known Micro$oft word to get confused with it's grammar and spell checker.

If you hyphonate it complains about grammar and suggests removing the hyphon and when you do it complains about spelling and suggests you add a hyphon, I can't off hand remember what the words are though!

Mel

I get a giggle every time I'm prompted to replace Dillards (the company I work for) with dullards. How did it know?

LOL

Mel

Yes, these spell checker writers seem to be well versed in irony. Try "Mark Moxon"

When spelling checkers came in first, I ran a list of my workmates through one. The following names stuck in my mind:

Tom Geraghty, Bertie Loughman and Gabriel O'Mara became Tom Gravity, Berate Longhand and Gabby Ovaries.

At least you can teach them new words! Or switch them off!

Mel

Microsoft Word's grammar checker gets cross about abbreviations. If you use etc in the middle of a sentence, it says it should be etc. with a full stop. If you change it to this, it thinks the full stop is the end of the sentence, which totally confuses it, as the next sentence starts with a lower-case letter and has no verb.

I think they have sorted this in some of the later versions.

Mel

Witney Houston = Whiney hoist

True.

I'm sure it's spelled "hyphen", not with an "o". Or is that British spelling? Do spell checkers using American English correct the orthography of (otherwise correct) British spellings? A really good one would know both. By the way, see if anything funny comes up when you spell-check "hyphon"!

Microshaft products, like most others, give you the option of selecting languages, including British and American English. American English is the default setting, so you need to change it.