Word Check is now available on a 12 months subscription.

Until now Word Check has only been available to clients and those purchasing my preferred Australian English spelling files. I've now decided to provide Word Check as a 12 months subscription for $4.95.

Word Check is a great way to check if you're using the preferred Australian English spelling for a word. Word Check provides suggestions should you spell a word incorrectly.

In addition I've provided convenience links so you can check the meaning of Words using both the Oxford and Wiktionary. Whilst you can go direct to these sites, only Word Check assures you that you are using the preferred Australian English spelling. Wiktionary is a good resource but there are quite a few errors that I and others have noticed and it can also be quite difficult to determine the Australian spelling as Australian spelling is generally not considered. With the Oxford site you may also have to retype the word. The Oxford site is not good at handling variations such as plurals and capitals, but if you retype a word the site does. With the Oxford dictionary site it can also be difficult to determine the preferred Australian spelling as Australian spelling is rarely considered.

When you purchase the 12 months subscription the current password is provided. I update a password a number of times a year and the new password will be provided during the subscription. The new password should be entered as soon as your receive it. The old password will be phased out in time.

The amount of $4.95 may be seen by many as a small contribution to assist me with my work, but it really is appreciated. Do keep in mind if you purchase one of the dictionary files you receive the Word Check password for free for the next twelve months as well in the purchase price.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.Australian-Dictionary.com.au

Google Chrome Australian dictionary and why my work is no longer open source.

When I first started the dictionary work in 2003, I created the first dictionary in my own time to help a client. The client didn't pay anything for the work as it was my choice to do it and not something the client requested, even though I felt they needed it and would use it for years to come. I then made the dictionary work available as open source as I had a belief that when you help others, others help you.

The real lesson I learnt is a mechanism has to be put into place so people give back and unfortunately the best mechanism I've found so far, is to make my work commercial and to charge a nominal amount for my work.

Here is what happens if you don't put a mechanism in place. Many projects come along, take the work in incorporate it into their project without a second thought, never giving anything back. Businesses do the same and the individuals who use the work, generally for free, never give it a second thought as well.

One of my early attempts to get something in return was to ask for a link back to my site. Links have value and cost nothing to implement but a little time. That didn't work. Here is a copy from my readme file on the Google Chromium project site. As you can see Google Chrome uses my older work (as does Firefox and many other projects) and I see no traffic in my logs from links, thus I can only assume no links were ever put into place.

In the end I decided it was not possible to simply keep giving to others and not to receive anything in return. So if you ever wondered what happened to my open source work hopefully that might help explain things a little.

Kelvin Eldridge
Australian Dictionary

Australian dictionary online has a password which you can get for free.

Many people visit my Australian Dictionary site and attempt to use Word Check. Word Check is my online tool to enable people to see if they're using the preferred Australian English spelling, to provide suggested words if the spelling is incorrect and to look up the meaning of a word using a convenient link.

Word Check is password protected and available for free to users of my dictionary products. To be frank, my testing shows making Word Check available without a password simply means people benefit from my efforts but give nothing back. The sales of my dictionary products do not change with or without the password, so I prefer to use my energy to help those that support me and by adding a password, I'm able to contain the cost of server resources.

I was thinking if you don't with to purchase one of my dictionary tools, but still wish to use Word Check, one way you could help me would be to provide an active link on the internet to my Australian Dictionary page. In return I'd be more than happy to provide the password. If this interests you please contact me.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.Australian-Dictionary.com.au

Is wright a correctly spelt word?

Can wright be right?

I found an example of extremely poor spellchecking on Google Docs (now part of Drive). I've provided a link to the site where I found the information.

For me what initially caught my attention was the spelling 'wright', which didn't seem right. I checked in Microsoft Word and the spelling was accepted as correct. It is correct, but some online sources consider 'wright' to be obsolete. The authoritative dictionary references for Australia (Macquarie and Oxford) both list the word and whilst 'wright' is generally considered to be used in conjunction with another word, 'wright' isn't flagged as obsolete, so 'wright' is a valid spelling. At this stage I'm not including the spelling 'wright' in the preferred Australian English dicitonary as it would be rarely used and could lead people to use the incorrect spelling. Should I find evidence to the contrary I will add the word 'wright' to the dictionary file.

However the bigger issue was the example the person gave which shows the terrible spellchecking by Google's service. Surely this isn't right. This is the example text which is shown in the link.

thiz iz the rong speling for moste ov thiz dokument befor I kant spel wright speling dokument wann yur.

https://02213839796342092351.googlegroups.com/attach/253467b0fe5bad79/GoogleDocSpellErrors.png?part=4&view=1&vt=ANaJVrGew6RdIENWnWdnDtBcOH5eygrvIuy-PTve7LgUrQ1ygc8eNfKZAfsFong48lBJuQGJfaKwSrIqA2PvEz2RW-lT6Mkq-DoyK7sNWunOjJ08eag9AP4

When I type the words three of the words are correct (I'm using my own preferred Australian English spelling dictionary on a MacBook Air). In Microsoft Word four of the words are spelt correctly. In Google Docs 12 of the words are spelt as correct, which means 8 that should be marked as errors aren't.

If this is correct and applies both to the free and paid versions of Google writing products, then I sincerely apologise to anyone I've suggested to use Google's services. I'm hoping it is a trick because the spellchecker appears to be inadequate and I simply can't believe it. If it is a trick then they've got me and I'll feel a bit of an idiot. I can handle that. But if it isn't a trick and Google's spellchecker is woeful, then I've been making poor suggestions for people to use Google Drive/Docs and for me that isn't good enough. If someone has paid access to Google's document app and could test this for me it would really be appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

Kelvin Eldridge
Australian Dictionary

PS. It should be noted that it appears that Google is trying to spellcheck the words and if you go slowly enough more words that are incorrect appear to be marked as incorrect. Certainly weird.