A few weeks back I received an email from one of my sisters, a typical email, an everyday, ordinary email, containing the word ‘atlatl’. Though I have a number of sisters, I have only one who is likely to use this word in an idle fashion.

Atlatl WP screenshot.png

So a few weeks go by and I am moved to reply to this email. What’s more, I feel the need to refer to the atlatls she mentioned. Typing ‘atlatl’ into the pristine whiteness of a text field produces a dotted red underlining which is Firefox’s way of alerting you to a misspelling or typo. This spellchecker is a new addition since Firefox version 2.0, and I am usually happy to have it enabled — it’s especially good for catching typos in blog comment fields. Right-clicking pulls up a context menu with suggestions for what you may have intended to type (above you can see what the dictionary thinks ‘atlatl’ was meant to be), as well as the option of adding the unknown word to the dictionary’s pool of knowledge.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that Firefox is ignorant of this word even if my sister is not. But sometimes the suggestions are pretty outrageous (see the last two offerings for ‘atlatl’).

Of course, I had to inform my sister that the onboard dictionary was unaware of the atlatl and that I was adding the word to the database, just in case I ever have reason to refer to paleolithic dart-launchers again. I find I spend a lot of time educating my dictionary, and there are times when we disagree. For example, on certain compound words:

Compounds screenshot.png

I am a bit surprised that Firefox’s creators did not make the dictionary a little more web-savvy, given what most users are doing with this browser all day and night:
Webwords screenshot.png

Related: Firefox seems to be ignorant of the string i + capitalized noun/verb, screening out iPod, iTunes, iPhoto, iSquint (well, okay), etc. Interestingly, ‘Yahoo’ and ‘Colbert’ gave no trouble.

At some point subsequent to the adding of ‘atlatl’ to my Firefox dictionary I typed the word ‘dumbassery’ and of course this got flagged, too:

Subassembly screencap.png

Use of email in blog posts:
Banjeroo’s thirteen-year-old emails
A Copper Cylinder’s maiden post deconstructs an email from his brother
‘Deconstruct’ should be ‘reconstruct’, says Firefox.

How to: edit your Firefox dictionary
Download additional dictionaries (including Slovene and five varieties of English)

Thematically related: Violations