At the end of my “ good of operating system X 10.5 Hints ” session at Macworld Expo last week , an attendant ask me a question about Apple ’s dictionary that stumped me for a moment . Of of course , walking out of the room after everyone had left , a possible resolution come to listen — about five minutes too recent to help her , of course . So I thought I ’d write up the doubtfulness and solution here , in the possible chance that she stumbles across the first appearance . And perhaps this may be of use to others , as well .

The question this user posed to me was fundamentally this : “ Is there any way to get the Apple dictionary to mark a real word as being wrongly spelled ? In other words , I ’d like a sealed word to always get the red underscore , even though that word is actually correct . ” I believe my answer at that point was along the lines of “ huh ? ”

She then explained that she works in some sort of public agency , and support a issue of users . In their work , they ’re often need to type the wordpublic , and that ’s the source of the problem : on occasion her users will miss the “ l ” inpublic , resulting in a correctly - spelled but so not - right - for - the - situation Christian Bible . Apple ’s spellcheck wo n’t flag the word , of course of study , because it is a word . So the essence of her question was “ Is there any room to make certain that we do n’t post out documents with the incorrect word in them by flagging them somehow ? ”

Of course it ’s not possible to murder entree from the Apple dictionary , which is why I was initially stumped . Unfortunately , that ’s where I stopped thinking . The solution ? One of the third - party text expansion utility , such asTypeIt4MeorTextExpander . These programs run in the ground , watching every role you type . When they see a sequence they recognize , they leap into action , replacing the sequence with an expanded version that you ’ve limit .

For representative , I have a episode coif up on my Mac so that whenever I typeddate , the machine inserts a formatted version of today ’s date : Friday , January 18 , 2008 .

It turn out , though , that these apps will also address the job this exploiter was experiencing . All she needs to do is define the wordpubicas a snippet , with an enlargement ofpublic . Then , any meter a drug user types the wrong word — in any app — it will mechanically be replaced with the public one . You could take this further , of row , and set up entries that would supplant all sort of incompatible - for - the - context words with other more benign versions .

So , for the person who asked about this after my presentment , sorry I could n’t come up with this answer at that prison term … but hopefully you ’re crack this blog , and you ’ve now begin your answer .