macOS built-in spell checker performs badly - what can I do?

Question

macOS Mojave cannot detect that I made a mistake at badd and cannot guess that "approximately" was spelled incorrectly.

How can I improve the built-in spell checker? (i.e. I don't want to use a spell checker inside Microsoft Word or similar third party application that has its own spell checker)

There is a good thread here, but no solution either:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7502895

I also tried Grammarly. That company promises in tons of online ads that its app and browser extension can help you identify “errors that other spelling and grammar checkers just can’t catch.”.

“...First Do No Harm” would be a better founding principle. IMHO Grammarly is not a good product because it caches many errors that aren't. Take any error-free text and look at what Grammarly does with it. Here, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Next I tried SpellCatcherX who was 100 times better when it worked, but it doesn't really work anymore.

http://www.rainmakerinc.com/products/spellcatcherx/

What can be done to improve this?

Answer 1

There is a small application that runs in the background called popclip which has add-ons to check your spelling. Seems to work almost everywhere. It has many other add-ons to help you work. I've been using pop=clip for years with no problem. The spell checker seems to run everywhere and if you select the misspelled word and double-click it, popclip presents you with an alternative spelling.

Answer 2

Actually, there is one.

This example is for US English.

First run these commands:

cd ~
curl -o en_US.dic https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wooorm/dictionaries/main/dictionaries/en/index.dic
curl -o en_US.aff https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wooorm/dictionaries/main/dictionaries/en/index.aff
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Spelling
sudo cp ~/en_US.* /Library/Spelling

Now go to System Preferences menu and under Text tab remove all checkboxes. All of them. They are bugy (After the below steps works for you, you can try to add them and see if they work for you).

Then, Click the Spelling drop down and scroll all the way down. Click "Set up..." Remove ALLLLL the options. Keep only "English" selected. and under English, select only U.S English (Library).

That's it. Click Done.

Answer 3

There is no actual way you can drastically improve the spellchecker.

You could try a third-party application. A good one to use would be Grammarly. I personally use it and it can be downloaded here.

It offers an extension for commonly used browsers as well.