con • trar • i • an
Note to Self: The global spellcheck built into Mac OS X can be contrarian, but with my propensity for typos there's enough irony in my not being able to trust it that the pain is eased to a dull ache.
Note to Readers: The first person to say theirs works fine, and to then suggest that perhaps ShapeShifter is affecting the spellchecker gets their IP address thrown in the firewall as -drop, as it's that kinda morning.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 07, 2006, at 10:04 AM
Comments (31)
Posted by: stinksoup at January 7, 2006 10:24 AM
Heh, holding down cmd-ctrl-d will also define it :)
Posted by: slawkenbergius at January 7, 2006 10:32 AM
...way to browbeat your readers into submission...
Posted by: Rosyna at January 7, 2006 10:45 AM
Did you try repairing permissions?
Posted by: Scott P. Richert at January 7, 2006 10:50 AM
It's working fine on your machine (as well as mine); it's just that the built-in spellchecker doesn't have "contrarian" as one of its words. The fact that Dictionary.app does have it means nothing--the two are unrelated. It would be nice if they shared their word list, but they don't.
Posted by: Matt Ball at January 7, 2006 11:34 AM
Scott: That's the problem. There's no reason for the spellchecker to not use the same word bank as the dictionary.
Posted by: Sally at January 7, 2006 11:37 AM
You should definitely try resetting the PMU.
Posted by: Scott P. Richert at January 7, 2006 11:54 AM
Matt: Yes and no. Ideally, they would. But a) the built-in spellchecker has been around for a lot longer than Dictionary.app, and it would have had to have been completely retooled to use Dictionary.app's data file (the spellchecker is literally just a list of words, not dictionary entries); and b) the dictionary currently used by Dictionary.app is the Oxford American, which Apple had to license. Licensing it for use in Dictionary.app is one thing; licensing it for use at the system level is quite another. Both Oxford University Press and Apple would have reasons why they might not want to do that--for instance, unless Apple has obtained a perpetual license (which is unlikely), OUP would be in a much stronger position, if the dictionary were used at the system level, to demand higher royalties next time the license came up for renewal.
It's also not clear to me that DB thought that the problem was that the spellchecker and Dictionary.app are not using the same word list--his post seems to indicate that he believes that there's a bug in OS X. Otherwise, why even mention Shapeshifter?
Posted by: eggsnatcher at January 7, 2006 12:07 PM
It's also not clear to me that DB thought that the problem was that the spellchecker and Dictionary.app are not using the same word list--his post seems to indicate that he believes that there's a bug in OS X. Otherwise, why even mention Shapeshifter?
In the past Drunken Batman writes problems and many comments focus on the window style in the screenshot and assume it is haxies. I read it as him "pre-emptively" saying that haxies cannot be related. Perhaps too poking fun at earlier broohahas in the last month?
Posted by: at January 7, 2006 12:13 PM
HA. DB is the only blog coming to mind where deconstructionism is helpful.
define "contrarian": opposing or rejecting popular opinion; going against current practice
Spellchecker is rejecting the consensus that contrarian is a word, shown by Dictionary.app, Microsoft Word and Google too. The wordplay can become a little deep on this site now, but fun. :-) A riddle in every post.
Posted by: RM at January 7, 2006 01:24 PM
The spellcheck wordlist is replaceable. I used (I think) aspell a long time ago.
Posted by: Stereo at January 7, 2006 01:59 PM
RM: I was about to suggest Cocoaspell too.
Posted by: Simone Manganelli at January 7, 2006 02:07 PM
Rosyna: Bahahahaha. Good one. :)
Posted by: jsnyder at January 7, 2006 03:02 PM
Yeah, I’ve noticed this one before. The dictionary doesn’t have all the same words that the spellchecker does (or vice versa). One would think that they’d work to make sure things were synced up, but ah well :-)
Posted by: Jason Terhorst at January 7, 2006 04:07 PM
If you tell it to "Ignore" (by right-clicking), does it go away? or does it stay that way?
Posted by: Jon H at January 7, 2006 05:16 PM
"The dictionary doesn’t have all the same words that the spellchecker does (or vice versa). One would think that they’d work to make sure things were synced up, but ah well :-"
Increasing the number of words in the spellchecker's list doesn't come free. The longer that list is, the longer it'll take to spellcheck. Just how much longer depends on the algorithm they use, and how much memory they use.
An easily extensible list of common words is probably a good compromise, since it's trivial to add words like contrarian which you know are correct.
One last problem is that Apple can easily provide spellcheck word lists from a variety languages, but as far as I'm aware they only license an English dictionary product.
Posted by: Derek at January 7, 2006 05:18 PM
Spellchecker is quite a fossil of updates. One thing that always boggles my mind is how Apple has not come up with a way to screen entries submitted from users online so they can add new words they missed in system updates.
Posted by: ssp at January 7, 2006 07:41 PM
While the technical problem here is quite obvious as has been mentioned, I am still not sure whether it's more or less absurd than OS X's spell checker marking the word 'podcast' as a typo and the very same OS' music player containing that word without blushing.
Looking for advice...
Posted by: Rafe H. at January 8, 2006 12:13 AM
I have the same problem with "rhombohedron", and a whole slew of other math-like words. Dictionary: check. Spellcheck: no guesses found.
Posted by: Rick Yaeger at January 8, 2006 02:15 AM
As I was remarking to my buddy Bill in iChat about the troubles I'm having crate training my puppy, I noticed that the global spellcheck built into Mac OS X is familiar with the word "pee" but not "poo" ...I don't know how to interpret that.
Posted by: Wes at January 8, 2006 04:43 AM
Increasing the number of words in the spellchecker's list doesn't come free. The longer that list is, the longer it'll take to spellcheck. Just how much longer depends on the algorithm they use, and how much memory they use.
It would be really really lame if Apple created or licensed a spell cheking algorithm that doesn't recognise a word as normal looking as contrarian, especially if it can find contrary or contra. I'm pretty sure contrarian follows standard "normal" English morphology (such as any such morphology has been discovered), not even necessitating a special rule or entry.
Posted by: Travis Cripps at January 8, 2006 04:52 AM
Holy cow, man. I thought I had a crowded dock. You have approximately a bajillion web links!
Nice bug, though.
Posted by: Dane Muldoon at January 8, 2006 02:52 PM
Good thing you aren't Australian then - every second word seemed to be misspelt the American way to me. Your country's over-zealous use of the letter 'z' is unbelievable - I must have defined "realise" as a correctly spelt word a thousand times alone on different Macs.
Posted by: Christopher Forsythe at January 8, 2006 03:19 PM
Good thing you aren't Australian then - every second word seemed to be misspelt the American way to me. Your country's over-zealous use of the letter 'z' is unbelievable - I must have defined "realise" as a correctly spelt word a thousand times alone on different Macs.
Have you tried setting your language to Australian English in the International prefs?
Posted by: Greg at January 8, 2006 09:25 PM
You could always just add the frickin' word to your spell-checker's dictionary.
Posted by: muro at January 9, 2006 03:12 AM
Actually, there are some reasons for not having every valid word in the spellcheck list. I don't know the source, but the reasoning is: You define only common words in the spellchecker and if the user uses other words, he can add them himself. If you take the whole dictionary as the source, you might end with errors, that do not show up. I can't say that I fully agree, but that is the idea behind it.
Posted by: Harry Potter at January 9, 2006 01:14 PM
Spell checkers are a pain in the wand. I had one replace "fillet of a fenny snake" with "fillet of a funny snake" in the middle of a battle with You Know Who and ended up knocked on my tuckus.
(of course, it should be "spellING checkers")
Posted by: Douglas Davidson at January 9, 2006 05:16 PM
The main reason why the spelling checker does not include every entry in the dictionary is that it would not be as effective if it did. The dictionary quite rightly strives for inclusiveness, and as a result includes a host of entries for variant spellings, regionalisms, and so forth. The point of a spelling checker is exclusion--that is, pointing out forms that are likely to be incorrect. It is far worse for it to silently pass over an error than for it to point out as an error something that is actually correct. As a result, the dictionary entries must be screened before being added to the spelling checker. That will be done, but it takes some time.
For those of you who use languages other than American English, please bring up the spelling panel with the "Spelling..." menu item, and take a look at the language selection popup.
Posted by: Abhi Beckert at January 9, 2006 11:54 PM
"Spell checkers are a pain in the wand."
Microsoft spell checkers are a pain. They're the only ones that automatically fix spelling errors rather than warn the user of a potential error.
Posted by: Kyle Miller at January 16, 2006 07:16 PM
The same goes for the work "munchkin". It's in dictionary.app, but not the global spellcheck dictionary. Damn them...
Posted by: Peter da Silva at January 17, 2006 09:05 AM
What I find most amusing is when the spelling checker highlights the name of an Apple product as a spelling error.
back to basics, back to bugs. :^) missed these.
confirmed on 10.4.3, Powerbook 768M / 1.5GHz