Built in spell checker not working

Hi everyone,

The OS built in spell checker of my mac is not working. I run 10.9.5 and in all Apple apps the issue is the same.

Misspelled words are not highlighted, and when I ran the "Check Spelling Now" nothing happens. The "Spelling and Grammar" Dialog box is empty, no matter which language I choose. I tried downloading new .dict and .aff files and placing them in ˜/Library/Spelling, but still nothing.

I have a laptop running Sierra in which the spell checker works perfectly. I tried copying every setting I could find to the analog in Mavericks, but I cannot turn that back on again.

Still I'm unsure when this started happening....

Any clues? It feels as if the built in spell checker is just not there any more....

Thanks everyone.