Why can't spell checkers correct “dissapear”?

1 pointinjb5 comments

I'm sure I'm not the only person who occasionally mistypes disappear as dissapear. But I have never ever seen a spell checker that can identify it correctly. The only offer I usually get is "dispensary".

They can correct the same pattern in similarly structured words - for instance they can correct dissapoint to disappoint. What is the issue with the word disappear?

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Android's keyboard does

And Chrome desktop. Also LanguageTool and Google.com. Firefox as well as LibreOffice do not. Outdated hunspell dictionaries is my guess for FF/libre.

OP here, I am probably guilty of conflating Firefox and LibreOffice with "everything", where typing is concerned.

It's a problem with the EN dictionary for hunspell. Probably it's treating "dis" as a prefix and looks for words that allow "dis" as a prefix, but then can't find any suggestions that use "dis" PFX but are like "sapear". The dictionary would be better if it had a rule that it should try to change "dis-s." to "dis-." (treating it as a possibly repeated character).

Just checked: macOS and iOS both correct this as intended.

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