How to Enable or Disable Spell-check and Grammar in LibreOffice

This tutorial shows how you can enable or disable spell checking in LibreOffice Writer.

If you use LibreOffice Writer to write documents, you might want to make your writing more accurate and have better grammar. Turning on the spell-checking feature helps you find and correct spelling mistakes and makes your writing easier to read.

But, if you are using specific words or terms that aren’t in the dictionary, you can turn off the spell-checking feature to avoid seeing incorrect spelling or grammar suggestions.

Note: Although LibreOffice supports over 200 languages, it only provides the spelling and grammar checking support for a handful of languages.

Supported Languages by LibreOffice

Asturian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Chinese (Simplified and Taiwan), English (British, Australia, USA, Canada), French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Latgalian, Latvian, Persian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Telugu, Thai and Ukrainian.

In short, if you see a green check mark next to a language in the drop-down list, LibreOffice can spell-check in that language.

Enabling Spell Checking and Grammar

There are two ways you can turn on the spell-checking feature in LibreOffice.

The First Method is Automatic: In this method, LibreOffice automatically adds a red colored underline to texts containing any spelling or grammar errors as you type in the document.

The Second Method is Manual:This is the most useful feature because most of the time, you don’t want to be annoyed by every possible spelling and grammar error while you’re in the moment of creativity. All you want at that specific moment is to write. During the editing or polishing phase, you can spell-check the entire document at once with just a few clicks.

How to Enable Automatic Spell-checking in LibreOffice

Step 1: From the top menu bar, go to Tools > Options or press Alt + F12 for shortcut.

If you’ve enabled a different user interface from the View > User Interface and can’t see the top menu bar (also known as the toolbar), click the leftmost icon on the ribbon to enable it.

Step 2: Navigate to Language Settings > Languages in the left pane, and ensure that you have selected a language that supports the spell-checking feature. Look for a green tick mark on the left side of the selected language from the drop-down list.

Step 3: Navigate to the Language Setting > Writing Aids, enable both Check spelling as you type and Check grammar as you type found under the Options section.

Finally, once done click Apply > OK.

Step 4: After enabling the spell-checking feature, you can turn on automatic spell-checking by going to Tools > Automatic Spell Checking or by using the keyboard shortcut Shift + F7 to quickly toggle between the two options.

Step 5: Once you enable automatic spell-check, LibreOffice Writer will highlight typos with red underlines. You can right-click on the underlined text to see the suggestions offered by LibreOffice.

Step 6: If you don’t want to enable automatic spell-check such as when you’re typing and working on the first draft, then you can simply turn it off and then reselect the Tools > Spelling option again when you need to check for writing mistakes.

Step 7: When you manually spell-check, LibreOffice opens a dialog window showing each error one at a time and provides options to ignore, correct, or add to dictionary to remove the red underline from the errors.

Disabling Spell Checking and Grammar

If you need to disable spell-checking, you can do so either through the Options dialog or by disabling it from Tools > Automatic Spell Checking in the top menu bar.