How to Disable Google Chrome Built-in Spell Checker?

[Posted in Browsers, Google Chrome, Troubleshooting]

This tutorial has been made as per visitors request. A few people asked me how to disable Chrome’s built-in spell-checker? There is no option to turn the spell-checker off in Chrome.

Actually Google Chrome provides a very limited options to change. So I spent some time in looking into Chrome settings and found a way to disable the spell-checker completely.

So here is a step-by-step method to disable Chrome spell-checker:

1. Open Chrome Options:

2. Go to “Minor Tweaks” tab and click on “Change font and language settings” button.

3. It’ll open a new window. Now go to “Languages” tab and look at “Spell-checker language” drop-down box at last.

Now comes the tricky part. You need to select some other language in this drop-down box. e.g. if “English (United States)” is selected in the list, then change it some other language like “Hindi (India)“:

4. It’ll show a message to close and restart Chrome to take effect.

5. Click on OK and OK and then Close buttons and exit from the browser.

6. Now we have completed half part. The above thing was done to create an entry for Spell-check directory in Chrome “Preferences” file.

Now we need to edit this entry. Type following string in RUN dialog box and press Enter:

local settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\

Now navigate to “User Data\Default” folder. Here you’ll see “Preferences” file.

7. Double-click on “Preferences” file and Windows will ask you to select a program to open this file. Select Notepad and click on OK button.

8. Now you’ll see an entry for “spellcheck” directory in that file:

9. We need to remove the directory name enclosed between double-quotes. So select the directory name as in our case its hi-IN and delete it.

10. Make sure to not remove the double-quotes. Now it’ll look as following:

11. That’s it. Save the file and restart Chrome. Now it’ll not check for spelling mistakes and the built-in spell-checker will be disabled:

NOTE: You might be thinking why to follow steps 1-5? Can’t we directly edit or paste those 3 lines of spellcheck directory in “Preferences” file? Actually I tried it, I pasted those 3 lines in “Preferences” file and started Chrome browser but to my surprise, it didn’t disable the spell-checker and when I opened the “Preferences” file again, the spellcheck lines were not present in the file, also all my custom settings were removed. So its better to allow Chrome to add those lines automatically by using steps 1-5.

PS: I’m not sure whether you’ll want to disable the spell-checker or not as personally I like this feature but since a few people asked for it, I decided to post this tutorial.

19 Replies:

Riza said:

Thank Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuu very much.
I needed to disable spell checker because I’m Albanian and cuurrently no spell checker for my native language.
Yeah, it’s OK to use for english (even I’m not very good in english) but I do not regulartly and I’m going nervous when I see red lines bellow words. Thanks again, VG. You made my day.
Riza said:

I do not regulartl = I do not use it regularly.
VG said:

^^ Welcome.
Jennifer said:

I need to disable the spellcheck (which just got flagged — boo!) because I have ADHD and the squiggles are distracting to the point of being disabling for me. (As are your smilies above, fwiw.)

I’m really unhappy that this wasn’t considered an important feature. Thank you so much for this. I’ll be trying it right now.
Roly said:

Thank you, great help!
YaToYa said:

That was a good job. You make this world a better place.
Riza said:

Cool. I was’ne the only guy who wanted this.
Jennifer said:

I had an odd experience with this.

Last night, I followed the directions above, although I picked a different spell-check language (and I can’t remember which one). It didn’t seem to help; if anything, it made *more* words get flagged. So I checked the Preferences file, and discovered that my deletion of the language code hadn’t been saved. I tried it several more time with the same result. I gave up.

This morning I gave it another try, and I specifically chose “Hindi-India”. And it worked! Thankyou!
Rudi said:

Thanks, very clever.
Choop said:

Thanks so much
Pierre said:

Many thanks.
You are really very smart.
Best regards.
Pierre
Antonio said:

Thanks !

Chrome spellchecker is unfinished, option to add new words is missing ! Without that is pretty much unusable and annoying
Gato said:

this tutorial’s really helpful
ranMa said:

Thanks a lot!
It’s incredible that we must do this trick to disable the spell checker…
Jussi said:

Thanks!
Viktor said:

thanks muchly! However good the googlers are, they’re mainly American - so what can you expect! The RotW doesnt exist for them!
Jacques said:

Thanks very much! exactly what I needed. Clearly laid out.
Jeff said:

Nice work, but I have a related question. Does Chrome have a way to suggest the correct spelling like Firefox does? If it does, it’s not working on my version and I’d like to know how to turn that on. Right now I only get the red squiggly lines but no suggestions. I need that because that’s how I spell 3/4 of my words Thanks!
hildigunnur said:

It would be sooo easy, just to have a language ‘none’, since of course Chrome won’t support all the worlds languages.