Nieman Foundation at Harvard
For journalists who run into trouble spelling proper nouns — the sort that a standard spell checker might not recognize — Google Docs comes to the rescue. Google engineer Yew Jin Lim writes that Docs is now using a spellcheck engine fueled by Google’s crawling of the web. In other words (ha), Docs should understand words that appear nowhere in a dictionary but everywhere on blogs or web pages.
Suggestions are constantly evolving. As Google crawls the web, we see new words, and if those new words become popular enough they’ll automatically be included in our spell checker — even pop culture terms, like Skrillex.
It also claims to solve the Icland is an icland problem — the ability to know contextually that the first should be Iceland and the second should be island. Google first showed off its ability to do that at the debut of Google Wave (remember?) back in 2009.
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