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I just got this from Office Watch (a newsletter for MS Office) and thought it was funny:

Palin isn't in the Word dictionary

You can tell election fever is getting too hot when poor old Microsoft Office gets dragged into arguments between Republicans vs. Democrats.

Earlier in the year we started getting messages accusing Microsoft of a right-wing bias. The reason? When you typed 'Obama' into Microsoft Word (and Hotmail) was marked as an incorrect spelling - worse the suggested 'correct' spelling was 'Osama'. This has been fixed though it took Microsoft a surprisingly long time to sort it out.

Now it's coming from the other end of the political spectrum. A few Office Watchers have been writing along these lines:

"Microsoft Word doesn't know how to spell 'Palin' as in the name of the next Vice-President of the USA. To add insult the corrections are either 'Pain' or 'Plain'. Why hasn't Microsoft fixed this? Do they want to add to the slurs against this fine woman?" - Jeremy J from Michigan

Jeremy is right that 'Palin' isn't recognized in Word 2007 but at the risk of getting into a political battle - there is no way that Microsoft is engaging in any bias or attempted slur. Let's all take a deep breath folks. There's neither conspiracy nor political bias here, it's just Microsoft Word working as it should.

If MS Word detects a word not in its dictionaries, it will flag it with the now-familiar red squiggly line. If you ask for suggested spellings the program will look for dictionary words that have similar spellings - in the case of 'Palin' the suggestions are: Plain, Paling, Pain, Palling and "Pal in" in Word 2007.

The supplied dictionaries in Microsoft Office now contain many proper names like common place names and names of well-known leaders (past and present). This latter category includes (for US English Word 2007) such names as Thatcher, Blair, Churchill, Roosevelt and Nixon. Some other names like Bush, Carter and Major didn't need special entries because they are also regular dictionary words. Clinton is a widely used place name and may have been in spell-checkers before 1992.

The exact rules Microsoft uses to include people in the Word dictionary are unknown and are probably not fixed in stone anyway. The guidelines would and should have some 'wriggle room' for exceptional circumstances.

Governor Palin was, until a few weeks ago, a US state governor. It's understandable that her surname isn't covered by the Word 2007 dictionary - events have been unanticipated and too little time has passed for any update to become available. With one exception there's no famous 'Palin' person or place names that would have put the word into the spell-checker before now. Since the suggested spellings aren't as odious as the one for Senator Obama, there's probably less pressure on Microsoft to supply a patch.

Other US state governor names like Rell (R-Connecticut), Crist (R-Florida), Minner (D-Delaware) and Beshear (D-Kentucky) don't make the Word 2007 dictionary. Governor Palin wasn't omitted deliberately - clearly being a US Governor isn't sufficient, of itself, to join the exalted ranks of MS Word dictionary listing .

How to fix it

There's a simple way to stop the red squiggly line for a particular word - you can do that for a single document or add it to your personal Office dictionary (which applies to all documents on that computer).

To mark a word as correct for a single document - right-click on the word and choose the 'Ignore All' from below the suggested spelling list.

To mark a word as OK for all documents - right-click on the word and choose 'Add to Dictionary'.

See an expanded version of this article online - including a modest suggestion for the next version of the Word dictionary.

Also on the Office Watch web site is a spin-off article: The Cheese Shop and Microsoft Word