Spell check doesn't work

I am a new user who has poured over the questions and answers with no success.

LO version 5.2.3.3
MS Windows 10 with current updates.
The spell checker never worked except once there appeared a squiggly line under a word but it wouldn’t give me a suggestion and has never done it again. Typing a sentence with obvious errors then selecting “Tools/Spelling and Grammar” results the message: “Spellcheck is complete”.
Selecting Tools/Language - gets a check mark for English (USA) and no others.

Looking in: “Tools->Options …, Language Settings->Writing Aids” Items with checks are the following:

Lightproof grammar checker English.

Standard all English.
en US english USA.
Technical all.
IgnoreAllList all.

Check spelling as you type.
Check uppercase words.
Check special regions.
Minimum number . . . . . 5
Characters before . . . . 2
Characters after. . . . . . 2
Hyphenate special regions.

Regarding: “in tools - Options - Language settings - Languages - Default Languages for Documents.” The defaults are set for English USA.

This isn’t an answer, please repost as a question. This board is hard enough to handle, you can’t have more than one specific question in one thread. Hunspell spell checker should be on.

You say “Repost as a question” then say “You can’t have more than one specific question in one thread.” That only serves to further confuse me. My second posting was not a question but was an attempt to supply more information as I was told. (???) Doesn’t the information I posted answer your questions? Also how do I turn on “Hunspell spell checker”?

Sorry, I must have been very confused when I posted that comment.

This problem was solved - is there something I’m supposed to do to close it?

*If my answer helped you, please vote it with :heavy_check_mark: (here on the left). That will help other people with the same question.*Tick the

In my case, all of the above tips checked out as “working”. Safe Mode showed the problem wasn’t with my profile, the Language Options were set correctly.

It turns out that my specific problem was that I’d selected Canadian English as my default language, but sudo apt policy hunspell-en-* indicated that only the US English dictionary was installed. sudo apt install hunspell-en-ca fixed my problem. I restarted Libre Office Write after installing the dictionary just in case, I’m not sure if that step was needed or not.

This problem was particularly vexing because the spell check claimed to be working but never flagged any of the purposefully wrongly spelled test words so very clearly wasn’t working. Just “Spell check complete” every time. As a programmer, functionality should never fail and be able to claim success.

I’m not sure how my system got into this situation, but I have a theory. I wiped and reinstalled from scratch Ubuntu 18.04 a few months ago. Then I restored various data from backup, including a number of spreadsheets and documents. I suspect that on my pre-wipe system, when I set Canadian English, it auto-installed the proper dictionary. When I opened an old document on my post-wipe system, the old settings in the document were used to update my new fresh profile, but the proper dictionary install step was not done.

Posted in case this helps someone else.

1 Like

It is not clear if language for your documents was properly set (in addition to install the proper dictionary). Defining the default language is done in Tools>Options, Language Settings>Languages.

I said above “the Language Options were set correctly”.

Language Settings → Languages → Default Languages for Documents → Western == Default - English (Canada)

Thank you studog. You solved my problem! I had the exact same issue and could not figure out what was wrong. Changing settings had no effect at all, but once I installed hunspell-en-ca everything worked properly. I agree that the absence of any warnings or error messages makes the problem especially confusing.

Hi,
I gave up, it kept going back to German no matter what I did.

I installed the latest version 7.2.0.4 and it all works great! (IE the spell checker is working in English and I didn’t have to change anything)

My recommendation is to install the latest version.

:man_cartwheeling: —Scott

By chance, did you post in the wrong topic? Isn’t this a comment/answer for cant-get-libreoffice-to-keep-english-setting-in-spelling-none/67827?