Google Chrome dev release adds multilingual spellchecking

Jul 13, 2015 09:42 GMT  ·  By

Small nuggets of information can often be extracted by following the dev release channels of many browser makers, and today we found out the Google Chrome team may be preparing a cool new update to its spell-checking engine.

By default, Chrome comes preinstalled to check English spelling on all new installations, unless downloading one of the browser versions that comes pre-installed with a different language pack.

Now the dev team is considering a change in the browser's language settings and is testing a new feature which would allow users to spell-check text in two or more languages at the same time.

The feature will be available only on Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS, since Chrome on Mac uses the default OS X language settings.

Only the UI has been added so far, functionality will be coming in future versions

Currently the Chrome dev releases only provides the UI of the new feature, no spell-checking being carried out in more than one language, as a Google engineers states in an email for 9to5Google.

If you want to see how this looks for yourself, these are the steps to follow to test it out:

Step 1: First you'll have to download Chrome 45.0.2453.0 or higher (Windows version, Linux version).

Step 2: This page right here shows you how to add command-line flags to your Chrome browser. To enable multi-lingual spell-checking you have to add "--enable-multilingual-spellchecker" to your Chrome shortcut. A special section in the chrome://flags section is also present where you can turn this feature on and off with the click of a button. The section is named "Enable Multilingual Spellchecker," and in the current Chrome dev doesn't work properly.

Step 3: Go to chrome://settings/languages and add some languages, configuring which ones to use by default on spell-checking suggestions.

Step 4: Find a textbox and start writing dumb stuff. Right-click a highlighted text and go to "Spell-checker options" in the popup menu to view the languages you just added in Step 3. Using checkmarks, you can then select which languages you want running for your spell-checker engine.

Future Chrome versions will support multilingual spell-checking
Future Chrome versions will support multilingual spell-checking

Enabling multilingual spellchecking on Google Chrome (3 Images)

Future Chrome versions will support multilingual spell-checking
You can turn it on from the chrome://flags sectionYou can also add and enable the languages you want it to use
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