The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

> Word has also been significant in helping establish English as the global language of business. While it would be an overstatement to say Word alone made English the dominant language, as a US firm, Microsoft's mother-tongue is American-English. When this is coupled with Word’s ubiquity, it at least reinforces this dominance.

> "Word primarily operates in English," says Noël Wolf, a linguistic expert at the language learning platform Babbel. "As businesses become increasingly global, the widespread use of Word in professional and technical fields has led to the borrowing of English terms and structures, which contribute to the trend of linguistic homogenisation."

I don't think I get it. Word "primarily operates in English" presumably because everybody reading this article speaks English and so uses Word in English, but Chinese people undoubtedly use Word in Chinese.

This feels like saying movies "primarily operate in English" because every movie I've seen spoke it.

> There is also some evidence that, in adults at least, rather than making users lazy spellers, autocorrect features can reduce exposure to misspellings and so avoid the disruptive impact this can have on our memory for how a word should be spelt.

I guess the author never used autocorrect. This is one of the first "feature" that gets disabled in Word either on the first run or at the first hit ( and it hits usually in the first run).

The article looks like a paid piece. Word did not help learn English. Programming languages and shells did (the way you interact with computers) because they were written in English.

I used computers since 1988 and the first time i encoutered word was around 1996.

Word is just another program and the cause of many lost nights (disk is full at 4 am) and hours of frustration ( who made this piece of €#&*, may he burn in hell).

> "Take the word "trialing/trialling" for instance. "Trialing" is considered the US-English spelling."

That would be like saying that "lory" is considered the US-English spelling of "lorry". "Trialling" is not something people say in the US. We say "trying out".