Just wanted to let you know that several simple words are underlined as wrong, but they actually exist, such as:
- towards
- amongst
I don’t know whether this is a Scrivener problem, but just in case…
Every spell checker I’ve ever used flags some correct words as wrong. If there’s a way to add words to your own dictionary, it’s not a big problem. YMMV
I knew towards was a word! I changed it to toward and it didn’t feel right. Alas, I’ll change it in edits later.
I’m also discovering that spell check does not agree with the words “grey” and “okay”.
The spellcheck doesn’t recognize an entire word in the case of “hadn’t.” It points at “dn’t” to tell me that’s not a word, but doesn’t seem to notice the “ha” appended to the beginning of it.
“Towards” is often used, and I use it all the time, though “toward” is supposed to be “more correct”.
I would tend to avoid “amongst” because “among” means exactly the same thing and is simpler; and that often means “less pretentious”.
The same goes for “whilst”… why not say “while”?
As for “okay”, I once (twenty years ago) had an all-day argument with a fellow editor about that. Technically, the capital letters “O” and “K” are historically correct: the political party of Martin Van Buren used “OK!” as a political rallying cry two hundred years ago, as “OK” stood as an abbreviation for “Old Kinderhook”, Van Buren’s country residence.
But the word has been part of normal English for so long that I feel it should be spelled (not “spelt”: that’s a kind of primitive wheat grain) like any other English word, i.e. as “okay”; otherwise in print it looks as though someone was shouting the word “ok” (rhymes with “wok”) at the top of their voice. For example, someone might say “Sure, right, fine, okay… do what you like.”
In English usage, things gradually change, and that’s okay. It used to be a criminal offence to say “lunch” when “luncheon” was what you meant; and these days the English “make a sandwich” while their American cousins “fix a sandwich”. An American might say to an Englishman “I fixed myself a sandwich this morning.” The Englishman might reply “Why, was it broken?”
best
JT
Have you updated to Beta 1.3 yet? This was fixed in 1.2 I thought.
The main bug I found with spellcheck is that learn spelling only works for the current session: as soon as you exit scrivener and open it again, it flags all the words previously added.
“Hadn’t” seems to greatly confuse it in that it wants to capitalise the word.
I’m also having this problem with Beta version 1.5. It learns the words. You save. You exit. You come back, and all the learned words are gone.