That Popish Microsoft
Posted on:: September 7th, 2003
Microsoft Word autocorrects “poppish” to “popish“, “Of or relating to the popes or the Roman Catholic Church”. Doesn’t that strike you as a word that probably shouldn’t make it onto the Most Frequently Misspelled list. Well, perhaps it’s misspelled a high percentage of times, but how often is it used? (Google lists 37,900 hits on popish and 4,780 on poppish. ) “Eleemosynary,” a word that has only been spelled correctly once without the aid of a dictionary, and that’s only because the writer was misspelling “eely missionary,” is also on the autocorrect list.
The corrections Word makes without asking are not all on the list of AutoCorrections at Tools-> AutoCorrect options. Anyone know where this list is kept?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Wow, I recently ran into ‘eleemosynary’ in a novel and had to consult the dictionary.
John Wright’s Golden Age is chockful of words you need to look up like ‘Oecumene’.
Of course, I’m no help with the question you asked… :)
you should be able to find it under Tools -> AutoCorrect (note that in Word 2K you may have to go to the down arrows at the bottom of the menu to make it appear.) there’s four tabs, which have lots of settings to play with, but the first one has the list of words that it’ll auto-correct.
although I didn’t find ‘poppish’ or ‘popish’ in my list of words….
(true story: the name of a city in my long-suffering scifi novel got changed because the original version was a word that Word kept wanting to autocorrect, and at the time I didn’t know how to fix it.)