spellcheck

• spell check, spell-check

Back-formation from spellchecker.

spellcheck (countable and uncountable, plural spellchecks)

1. The act of spellchecking.

   You'd better run another spellcheck now that you've written that extra chapter.

2. A spellchecker.

   My wordprocessor is supposed to have a spellcheck, but I don't know how to use it.

   • 1995 April 9, Diane Ketcham, “About Long Island; ‘If You Can’t Spell You Look Stupid’”, in The New York Times‎^[1], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 26 May 2015:

     "We want to make sure our children know how to spell in English." They will if they learn the Reading Reform way, Mrs. Goldberg told them. "I've been teaching this method for 18 years," she said. And never once used a spelling aid? "Well," she said, "I am a recent user of 'spellcheck.' I thought I might make some typos on the computer and spellcheck would pick that up. So I started using it. Then the other day I found I made a serious error, and it hadn't been picked up. I had come to rely on spellcheck!"

spellcheck (third-person singular simple present spellchecks, present participle spellchecking, simple past and past participle spellchecked)

1. To check that words in written text are properly spelled.
2. (transitive) To run a spellchecker on (a document).