How to Improve Spell Checking on macOS

I used to have trouble with spelling suggestions in Chrome, Slack and elsewhere on macOS.

I was able to fix it by changing the Input Sources setting in macOS to U.S. English. Here are the steps, although these will vary from system to system.

Select System Settings from the Apple Menu (top left corner)
Find Spelling and prediction in the list
Edit the Spelling value and change it to U.S. English (or your language)
Click Done and close the settings

The reason I think this works is that when the setting is Automatically by language it has to use the surrounding writing for context. This means that it’s difficult to spellcheck certain individual words alone, such as appetite misspelled as apetite. It makes it feel slower because it can’t show errors until after you type three or four words and it can predict the language. Even then there might be differences between U.S. English, Canadian English, and UK English that it can’t resolve without more words to give it context. By setting it to your primary language it can just check that language.

The down-side is that it won’t check other languages if you’re multi-lingual and regularly type in multiple languages. In that case you might prefer the trade-off of Automatically by language.

Written by Joel Dare on April 24, 2025.

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