How To Turn Off Spell Check in Windows 10

Very few modern conveniences have permeated technology like spell checking. Mistype or misspell a word and spell check is there, ready to fix your mistakes so that you don’t accidentally look foolish in a tweet or Facebook status message. We expect the iPhone and devices running Google’s Android operating system to include spell check due to their touchscreen keyboards. Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system has spell check for notebooks, desktops tablets and smartphones.

Spell check is seamlessly integrated into Windows 10. From the moment you start up a device running the operating system, it’s there. Rather than wait for you to correct your mistakes, the feature jumps in tries to find the word you meant to type.

Sometimes integrated spell check is great. Other times, it can inflict more pain than it’s worth. In those cases, you’ll want to turn off spell check in Windows 10. Here’s how to do that.

Before We Begin

Theoretically speaking, Windows 10 spell check is there to keep you from making mistakes. Before you go turning it off, you want to be absolutely sure that you don’t need it.

After you’ve turned the feature off, you’ll notice how often you mistype or misspell a word and the operating system corrects it for you. Don’t worry, if you regret turning spell check off, you can turn it on again. Note that the process for enabling and disabling spell check in Windows 10 is identical for notebooks and tablets running the operating system. The process is slightly different for smartphones running Windows 10.

What You Need to Know

Press the Windows key on your keyboard or the Windows button in the Taskbar to open the Start.

Welcome to the Start experience. Depending on whether you have Tablet Mode on or not, your Start experience could be a bit different from what’s above. Tap or click on the Menu button in the bottom-left corner of the Start Screen to get a list of all the apps installed on your device.

Now tap or click on the Settings option in the left-corner of your screen. Users with Tablet Mode turned off on their device will see the Settings option in Start the moment they open it.

Inside the Settings app, tap or click on Devices. It’s the second option from the left side of your screen in the top row.

Now tap or click on Typing.

From here, you can customize many of the keyboard enhancements that Microsoft made in Windows 10 and Windows 8. To turn off spell check, click or tap on the switch under Auto-correct misspelled words. This will kill off auto-correct.

Just under that option is Highlight misspelled words. Disabling this will kill the red underlines that let you know that you’ve misspelled something. In general, disabling spell check is just fine, but it’s a bad idea to disable both spell check and highlighting for misspelled words. You’ll have to monitor what you type very closely to avoid misspellings, if that’s the route you take.

Below these options, there are settings for typing and for Windows 10’s touch keyboard. These options don’t do anything for users that have physical keyboards connected to their device instead of relying on touch.

It’s important to note that the changes you make here will permeate Windows 10. For example, Windows Store apps offload spellcheck functionality to Windows itself. If you’ve disabled the feature in Windows, you might not have spell check in some of these apps as well.

With Windows 8, making a change like this would automatically sync to your other devices. With Windows 10, it doesn’t. This means you’ll have to manually disable spell check on all the devices that you want it gone on.