How to Disable Google Chrome Built-in Spell Checker?

This tutorial has been made as per visitors request. A few people asked me how to disable Chrome's built-in spell-checker? So this tutorial will help you in disabling the built-in spell-checker.

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.

NOTE: If you are using the latest Chrome version, you'll see a checkbox "Check spelling". Disable it and you have done. But if you are using an older version (which you should not use and upgrade to latest version immediately), do as following:

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,

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This article was posted in Browsers, Google Chrome, Troubleshooting.

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23 Comments

VG

^^ Yep. The new versions provide the option to disable spell-checker. Updated the above tutorial.
Lucy

Thanks - this has been driving me crazy for ages.
John

A spell checker for Albanian is available in Firefox.