This is pretty cool. Google Docs now has an updated spell-check system that doesn't just look up words from a fixed dictionary, but looks at the context of every word in the sentence its in to figure out if it may be misspelled. Its understanding of contextual spellings and unorthodox words (eg. from popular culture) are pulled from the same database as Google Search. In a blog post, Google engineer Yew Jin Lim explained the benefits of the new spell check:
- Suggestions are contextual. For example, the spell checker is now smart enough to know what you mean if you type “Icland is an icland.”
- Contextual suggestions are made even if the misspelled word is in the dictionary. If you write “Let’s meat tomorrow morning for coffee” you’ll see a suggestion to change “meat” to “meet."
- Suggestions are constantly evolving. As Google crawls the web, we see new words, and if those new words become popular enough they’ll automatically be included in our spell checker—even pop culture terms, like Skrillex.
Users have already pointed that that this feature will eventually be added to Chrome's integrated spell-check for any text field, and has already made its way into the most recent Chrome canary build.
Hat tip to Adam at Lifehacker.