Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Spell-Check Won't Work.
One of the powerful tools provided with Word is the spell checker. As you are creating your documents, you may notice that Word doesn't always find spelling errors. There are two things you can check if this is the case.
First, if the misspelled words are in uppercase, you may have spell checking turned off for words that are all in uppercase. To turn on this capability, follow these steps:
Figure 1. The Spelling & Grammar tab of the Options dialog box.
Next, if entire paragraphs are being ignored, it could be because proofing has been turned off for the paragraph. Follow these steps to correct this problem in Word 97:
If you are using Word 2000, Word 2002, or Word 2003, the steps are slightly different:
Figure 2. The Language dialog box.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (5596) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Spell-Check Won't Work.
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Word 2002 has an issue with the SpellCheck feature returning a dll error.
Discover MoreWhen you tell Word's spell checker to ignore all instances of a misspelling, you may expect that the misspelling will be ...
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2017-06-14 16:54:35
Farshid Tafazoli
To fix it simply press CTRL+A and then SHIFT+F1. In the opened bar on the right side of the document, under the fonts section click on LANGUAGE and from the opened windows choose English (United States) as the default font, make sure that the 'DO NOT CHECK SPELLING OR GRAMMAR' is UNCHECKED, then click on set as default. You can now browse the entire document and look for spelling errors as it will be back working.
2015-07-04 10:58:35
John
Spell check stopped working one day to the next without any setting changes by me. I looked at preferences and they are still as if the spell check should be active.
2015-06-25 13:57:31
Thanks for solving my problem, spellcheck now works :-)
2015-01-09 06:32:36
Steve Taylor
Well looks like the random hand of Microsoft has struck again.
The problem? Spell check works on part of the document only! 20 pages completed and functioning, next page it doesn't then check. I've changed nothing ...... fantastic
2014-12-31 12:55:56
Heidi
What if it still does not work? I already tried everything mentioned in this post, before even reading this post.
Got a version of Word that uses the menu interface (Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, or Word 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: 
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