9 million words added to spelling dictionary

As part of our mission to making our spelling checker as easy-to-use as possible, we’ve added over 9 million new words to our dictionary.

The English language only has around 170,000 words, so you may be wondering how this is possible. The problem is, what appears in a traditional dictionary only covers a tiny portion of what people use on their websites.

Most of what we’ve added includes people’s names, places, and business names, plus massive amounts of jargon from law, medicine, technology, and more. There was no standard lists for these, so we had to build our own.

As part of an extensive research project we gathered and cross-checked data from numerous sources including millions of real webpages and corrections submitted by our own users.

Most of the 9 million words are focused on either English or all languages (for example, brands like “iPhone” apply to all languages).

As a result of this change, anyone testing their spelling may see a reduction in their number of unrecognized words.