Turn Off Auto Correct in Mac OS X Lion & Mountain Lion
The Mac has an autocorrect feature that can range from excellent to annoying, and it works by attempting to automatically correct typos and misspellings of words as they appear, which are instantly compared to an extensive dictionary and replaced on the fly. It can be a great feature but it’s not perfect, and how you feel about auto-corrections really depends on what you’re trying to type, how often you make typos, and what your individual experience is with the corrections themselves, much of which can depend on typing habits themselves. If you find yourself on the annoyed end of things with OS X Lion & Mountain Lion’s new auto correct feature, you will be pleased to discover it can be disabled quickly.
Disabling Auto-Correct in Mac OS X
This applies to OS X 10.7 (Lion), OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), and later:
- Launch System Preferences from the Apple menu, then choose on “Language & Text”
- Click on the “Text” tab and uncheck the box next to “correct spelling automatically”
Here is what the OFF setting will look like in the preference panel:
Auto correct in OS X arrived with Lion, and overall it’s seemingly a lot more intelligent than it was when first introduced in iOS. As a cross OS feature, it has gotten much better as the autocorrect dictionary will learn from your typing habits, words, and even mistakes, but it can still be frustrating from time to time, and it’s not uncommon for it to be improperly triggered and make the wrong assumptions when you are typing unique names of people, products, companies, slang, and even various tech terms.
Obviously if you want auto-corrections enabled again, you just need to venture back into Language & Text preferences to recheck that box, which is then toggled back on.
Update: If you are experiencing annoying autocorrections like ‘colour’ to ‘color’ this is a language priority setting that must be adjusted separately in OS X.
I like the spelling corrections and I haven’t found it to be a nuisance in Lion. I completely agree about iOS’s version though, it is overly aggressive and replaces words with other words, despite being spelled properly.
- and, of course, the auto-correct feature is annoying to people trying to type words -or entire documents, even- in a language other than english.
Exactly.
or Code.
Haha AMEN to that! Coding in Lion is hell with auto-correct.
Holy crap, is it being enabled in IDEs? Thats just…… bad.
intellisense type tools are more than capable of that without some stupid spelling checker converting “writeln” to “written”.
I didn’t had any trouble with Xcode, but yes with foreign english typing and other text like ‘waterlog’ becomes ‘waterloo’
i have unchecked it and its still auto correcting me even on msn! please help! x
same here… first i tried turning the feature off within the TextEdit application, but it didn’t work.. then read this thread and turned it off at the OS level, and STILL didn’t work, autocorrect is still on…
naughty naughty
Said in my best Irish/English accent, “have you tried turning it off and on again?”
I found it! Edit > Spelling!
you are my hero, this has been driving me crazy
After disabling from System Preferences, it shows as the blue bubble while typing, need to press the Esc before Space. I think that’s the max you can get for your money
seriously… thank you. I am so sick of typing things twice. I spend all day coding and using business names… they love to change them on me.
Mine is still auto correcting too. Lion is a huge PITA so far
I really like some aspects of lion. But 60% of its new “features” I’ve had to disable. Apple really need to abandon the stupid “no focus groups ” idea.
Ah, safari has it’s own. Edit > Spelling and Grammar, there it is
THANK YOU
[...] you disabled spelling auto-correct in Mac OS X Lion but find yourself still being autocorrected as you type various words in Safari, [...]
[...] autocorrect feature is very useful, so instead of turning it off, set a language priority and you’ll alleviate the aforementioned [...]
Thank you! It’s been bugging the hell out of me every day, I know the word is spelled right but it corrects it to something else anyway. Particularly bad when talking about Dragonball Z character names and music producing gear like the Maschine (corrects it to Machine)
[...] I was typing in OmniOutliner and I realized that OSX was trying to correct my spelling. It reminded me too much of using a mobile phone because it wasn’t my spelling that was off — it was picking on names. Best way is to turn off auto correct for spelling. [...]
Thanks…. it put an o in calling somebody a count and I realised it had to go!
For some reason when I go into my system preferences and click on the Text and Language tab there is no option to uncheck correct spelling automatically like shown in the picture. My computer still continues to autocorrect but I cant de-activate it because I don’t have that box.
What is really insane is when it “corrects” passwords. The damn things are supposed to be unique so correction virtually never makes sense.
I’m new to the whole iMac and apple stuff and I need help please. I’m using pages 09 to type some documents in English and Swedish. The auto correct is driving me nuts because it keeps replacing Swedish words with English. I did the above step and disabled the auto correct, however, it still replaces the Swedish words. I have a Swedish keyboard and typing words correct but pages just won’t accept them. I just want it to stop replacing/correcting words automatically.
Any suggestions or help would be great. Thanks
Hi Tonya
Be sure to select Swedish or English as the chose language for the document you are writing.
[...] of text editors that has carried over into OS X. The keyboard shortcut is most useful if you have autocorrect disabled, otherwise those minor typos tend to fix [...]
thank you for this! auto correct has been driving me insane! I work in a technical field and every time we get into jargon, that damn thing decreased my productivity by 1000?%
[...] Turn off OS X auto correct ! [...]
Thanks! Helpful post.
I have spell-check turned off on the Text system preference panel. But every time I launch an application that uses text I have to turn it off in the app preferences; it’s never saved anymore. This started with 10.7.4 and it’s driving me mad. I loathe those red squiggles while I’m typing, and they’re rarely correct, anyway. Before, it was just a matter of setting the preference once with each application. Now, it I’m not allowed for it to be my “preference” at all.
[...] are the same that are underlined in red for typos, or underlined in green for improper grammar. For auto-corrected words, you’ll find them underlined in [...]
I’ve turn it off in System Prefs and in Pages and in Safari and it still in correcting, wrongly! Help, where else do I turn it off?
Okay, found it. There is the global setting in Sys Prefs, but two places in pages (Pages, Preferences and Edit, Spelling)!
[...] bug was first reported on OpenRadar and is thought to relate to the spell checking and autocorrection features, though the bug is also replicable in prior versions of Mac OS X suggesting that may not [...]
The fact that you cannot turn this crap off is beyond me, I cannot understand how these morons can get something so simple so damn frikken wrong.