Meryl's Notes Blog

The Microsoft Office Team reports that Microsoft has added 58,000 words to the US English dictionary including the following:

• Possessives, i.e. the possessive form of words that already were in the lexicon
• The most frequent male, female and last names from the 2000 Census data and other sources. Examples: Brianne, Britta, Carissa, Carolyn, Carmela
• Company names, such as Verizon, WorldCom
• Names of autonomous Native American governmental units
• Names of the official UN countries, as well as most languages in our market areas, e.g. Indic language names
• Place names, such as all world capitals and other major cities, e.g. Wuppertal
• Miscellaneous words that were missing from the lexicon: e.g. Camus, Wyeth, Woolf

Office 2007 also comes with a new feature Microsoft refers to as contextual spelling. It watches for correctly spelled words that aren’t the right word based on the sentence. We all do this. I know the difference between your and you’re; too, to, and two; and their and there — it I’ve caught myself typing the wrong word many times. Why does this happen? I guess we get a word in our heads and our fingers spew out the wrong word.

If you write, “You’re shoe is untied,” Office 2007 will mark “you’re” as an error. Nice feature to have! Even us grammar geeks make mistakes and sometimes we don’t see it when proofing.