Symbols in Words Added to the Dictionary

Steve's company name requires the use of a symbol within the name. In his case, the symbol is a lowercase letter "a" with a straight line over it. Steve can create the correct spelling just fine in Word, and he can even add the proper spelling to the dictionary. However, Word insists on marking the word as incorrectly spelled, even though Steve added it to the dictionary. He wonders how he can get Word to accept the correct spelling of the company name, with the symbol in place.

The line over the lowercase "a" is technically referred to as a macron. Word should accept the word as correctly spelled (once added to the dictionary) provided that the macron is part of the actual character itself. Normally, you would use a Unicode character in your document (such as the character using code 0101), so that Word sees it as a regular character.

Note that once you get Word to accept the spelling of the word on your system, that doesn't mean that other systems won't mark it as incorrectly spelled. The reason is that when you add the word to the dictionary, that only affects a single system. Transfer the document to another system that hasn't added the word to the dictionary and it will be marked as incorrectly spelled on that system.

If that is the issue you want to avoid, then the only solution is to mark all instances of the company name so that Word doesn't check its spelling. How you exempt words from checking has been covered in other issues of WordTips. You can also find information here:

http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/MasterSpellCheck.htm#ExemptingText

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10170) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Symbols in Words Added to the Dictionary.