Spelling screen
This screen shows unrecognized spellings found in this website. It looks at words in both the visible text of your website, and in other areas that people may only see indirectly, such as page titles, drop-down menus and alternative text.
Why it matters
Poor spelling leaves a negative impression of your website, can make your content harder to understand.
How to use it
You can browse between two tabs:
- Unrecognized spellings – words that are not recognized and which you should review
- Approved spellings – words which were manually approved as correct
Below the tabs is a table listing the words, suggested corrections to the words, and the number of occurrences of that word.
Words are classified by severity, with the most likely misspellings listed first:
- Likely spelling errors include words which are known to be incorrect (e.g. “color” if your language is UK English), or words which appear very likely to be incorrect
- Potential spelling errors include unrecognized words which look like a person or company’s name.
- Incorrect case highlights words which appear to be correctly spelled, but with the incorrect case, e.g. “iPhone” written as “IPhone”.
- Invisible spelling errors lists unrecognized words that are not normally visible when a page loads, including alternative text, meta tags, text that is hidden with CSS, and more.
For each word, you can click on:
- Magnifying glass – this opens the Inspector, which shows you where the word appears on a page.
- Learn – this will add the word to your dictionary for the current site. Other websites are unaffected.
- Google logo (‘G’) – this will Google for the word, which is useful for checking spellings you’re not sure about.
If you open the Inspector, you will see the unrecognized word highlighted on a specific page:
Here you can click Learn next to a word to add that spelling to the dictionary for the current website. Other websites will be unaffected.
You can click Ignore to ignore the spelling for all pages, and not add it to the dictionary.
There are additional options if you click the drop-down arrow next to the buttons:
You can also ignore this spelling for this page, which is like Ignore, except the word is only ignored on this page.
Finally you can choose to ignore all spellings on this page, which can be handy for pages containing a lot of purposely misspelled words.
Handling multiple languages
If you are seeing lots of unrecognized words from other languages in your spelling test, you should add those languages to your settings for the website. Click on Change languages at the bottom of your report:
Silktide spell checks using the combination of the languages you specify. So if you mark a website as in English and German, then spellings from both of those languages are considered acceptable.
If Silktide encounters a page which looks like it uses another language, it will attempt to guess that language and test it automatically. This guess is not accurate enough to identify the different between regional variations (e.g. US versus UK English) and so you should specify the language explicitly wherever possible.
Understanding invisible spelling errors
Silktide may find spelling errors in parts of your page that are not visible. See invisible text.