Spell checking for Mail on iMac (Mojave)

If you go to the "Language & Region" preference pane in the "System Preferences" app, you can add additional languages to the list using the plus sign in the lower left corner of the pane. You will find Greek in the list of available languages after you hit the plus sign.

After you select the languages that you want, and dragged them to the order that you want, do the following:

1. Click on the "Keyboard Preferences" button near the bottom of that same pane.
2. When that window opens, select the "Text" tab.
3. On the Text tab, make sure that "Correct spelling automatically" is enabled.
4. Below that, in the "Spelling" drop-down menu, select "Automatic by Language". This will allow your Mac to choose the language to use. Or, if you prefer to specify the language to use yourself, select it from the drop-down menu.
5. After you've done that, simply close the "Language & Region" prefs pane to save your changes, and you are done.

I hope this helps. Let me know. Thanks!

soti145 wrote:

While spell checking works ok when composing emails in English or German or French, it doesn't seem to work for Greek. Any ideas/suggestions?

Apple doesn't supply Greek spellcheck, you have to download and add .dic and .aff files yourself. See if this page helps:

https://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2011/06/extra-spell-checking-dictionaries-for.html

Unfortunately Apple only supports spell check by a few languages out of the box, despite the many languages listed in Language preferences: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Turkish, Norwegian, Finnish, Korean and Russian.

Well, Greek is actually shown in the language list -- it says "Greek" -- in Greek -- followed by "- Greek". However, according to Tom's posts above, while setting that up as I explained in my previous allows you to type in Greek in Mail, BBEdit, TextEdit, etc., it does not actually install a Greek dictionary for spell-checking.

I don't quite understand that because when I open BBEdit, it does allow me to select Greek as the spell-checking language. But who knows.

BTW, I did download the Greek dictionary and placed it in my "Spelling" folder in my Home library, but I couldn't really tell if it was working or not, because I don't know Greek. :)

WordWeaver777 wrote:

when I open BBEdit, it does allow me to select Greek as the spell-checking language.

That's very interesting! Could you post a screenshot of the place where it lets you choose that?

In MacOS the Language settings really only relate to the interface language. Typing is determined independently in System Preferences/Keyboard/Input Sources. Spelling is determined independently in System Preferences/Keyboard/Text/Spelling and in Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Show Spelling and Grammar.

Some apps like Word don't use Apple's stuff and have their own Spellcheck. Word does have Greek and a number of others which Apple does not:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/proofing-tools-available-in-office-for-mac-e175007d-193d-4efc-afce-5e27a59f1057?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US&fromAR=1

Thanks!

The (LIbrary) indicates this is a 3rd party dictionary added to the OS. Apple's own dictionaries do not have that after the name.

Edit > Spelling and Grammar is the control at the app level for most Apple apps:

Ha! Oh gosh! I have been at this too long today. It was right in front of my face, and I didn't even realize it. I knew the menu option name seemed very familiar to me, and that I had seen it before. :)

I think that part of the reason I was confused, is because in BBEdit, Rich does things a little differently, like this:

Notice . . . No mention of "Spelling & Grammar" until you actually open the window which corresponds to the "Show Spelling Panel" menu option. But it IS under the "Edit" menu. :)

And, yes, I downloaded that dictionary from the web, both .aff and .dic files.

The left image is the lower half of BBEdit's spelling panel. Notice that I have the Greek dictionary selected as the default dictionary. The right image is just part of a BBEdit file which I translated from English to Greek. If I run the spellchecker on it while it is set to Greek, the only misspelled word that it finds is two occurrences of "anime", because all of the rest is proper Greek, thanks to Google Translate. :)

What do you mean by "and in Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Show Spelling and Grammar."? Where is that found in the System Preferences app in Mojave 10.14.4? I couldn't find it anywhere.

Going to bed now. TTYL.

Ha! That is EXACTLY what I did as well, which is precisely why you see the Greek dictionary listed in my BBEdit spellchecker window in my previous post. In other words, like you, I extracted the .dic and .aff files from the downloaded .oxt archive, placed them in ~Library/Spelling/, rebooted my iMac, and that was it . . . well, besides all of the settings changes I mentioned in my previous post above. Glad you got it working as well. :)