There are a couple of concerns I have in using the spellchecker in Word. Firstly, I have found that, both in Word 97 and Word 2000 the Australian spelling is very close to US spelling. I have set all my templates and ‘normal.dot’ to UK spelling which I think is the closest to Australian spelling. Despite this, US spelling continues to crop up from time to time. How can I eliminate the US spelling dictionary for once and for all so that my Word program never has recourse to it. How can I do the same thing for Eudora?

I am not totally sure on this, but it seems that most word processing packages have one central spell check file based on US spelling with a supplementary dictionary to cover any local variations with spelling. I use WordPerfect 9 and I looked at the spell check file and looked up ‘labour’ and ‘labor’ (the Australian and US spelling). Both of these words came up in their different spelling in the dictionary file. However, when I went into WordPerfect and typed ‘labor’ it said that it was spelt incorrectly. This may indicate that most of the spelling corrections are carried out using the main US spelling dictionary but different spellings for different languages are also accommodated (possibly by another language specific spelling file). This theory could also be applied to Eudora. In short, I don’t think that it is possible to totally take away the US spelling dictionary. However, if any other readers would like to correct me or have any suggestions on this, please send them in.