How to disable Google Chrome spell checking on Mac OS X

Tuesday, December 15th 2009 at 17:14 in Technology, Apple

If you are using Chrome Beta:

1. Quit Chrome
2. Edit ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Preferences
3. Add an entry that says:

"spellcheck": {
   "dictionary": ""
}

4. Restart Chrome

When you add the entry at the end of the file, make sure to add a "," at the end of the previous entry. The result should look something like this:

...
   "webkit": {
      "webprefs": {
         "inspector_settings": "lastActivePanel:string:scripts\n"
      }
   },
   "spellcheck": {
      "dictionary": ""
   }
}

If you are using Chromium, the file is ~/Library/Application\ Support/Chromium/Default/Preferences.

16 Comments

	Casper 16.12.2009 20:44:18 Thx!!!
	Colin Barnes 3.1.2010 06:07:52 This does not persist if cache, etc are cleared on exiting Google Chrome.
	Art Vandelay 26.1.2010 07:45:03 Your instructions are a little off. There's ALREADY a line that says "dictionary": "en-US" so you just change that to "dictionary": "" instead of adding all that at the end. The first few times I tried this, it didn't work, then I realized what was wrong.
	Kennu 26.1.2010 11:30:24 Apparently this is changing with new versions of Chrome, so please be careful and keep backups of the Preferences file. The setting will probably eventually be in the GUI settings dialog.
	Steff 10.2.2010 14:09:41 Thanks a lot. What's up with googles lack of Mac support?
	Andoro 2.4.2010 12:40:45 Hi! I can't find my preferences file. I've Snow Leopard and Chrome 5.0.342.7 beta... Someone could help me? THX
	Joey Connick 5.4.2010 05:13:32 Either updating to Snow Leopard broke this fix or the latest update to Google Chrome did. Anyone have any idea why spellcheck has "come back?" sigh
	Matthew 12.4.2010 17:40:55 Hi Kenneth, That was very useful, thanks. Unfortunately I'm suffering the same problem as Joey above - despite the edit to the preferences file (which doesn't seem to have been reverted) spellcheck seems to have come back but only for punctuation. If you figure out a workaround for this one please let us know. Not only is it very irritating, it also slows down the keyboard buffer hugely when you're editing inside a field (as I am now, for example) - ironically mainly a problem when I'm using Google Docs. If it doesn't get fixed will need to change back to Firefox.
	Jørn Støylen 15.4.2010 10:47:51 Joey/Matthew: I had the same problem (spell-checked punctuation only), but managed to fix it: If you right-click in a text field and check out the "Spell-checker Options", you'll most likely find an empty slot among your choice of languages. I think Google changed the way Chrome handles an empty string in the preference file so that this trick no longer works as advertised here. However, I found a fix of sorts: Choose another language, then quit Chrome. Edit the pref file again, find the "spellcheck" entry and change the "dictionary" to something that isn't in the list. I chose "no-NB" (Norwegian Bokmål) which would be my native language – which made Chrome stop spell-checking altogether (even though the language is correctly named in the list in Chrome's context menu).
	Matthew 15.4.2010 12:32:38 hooray! that seems to have solved the problem - at least until their next update. many thanks indeed.
	Joey Connick 17.4.2010 09:06:47 Okay, seems to work so far... thanks! Why there just isn't a way to turn it off plain and simple like on Windows is totally beyond me!
	Art Vandelay 3.5.2010 23:22:48 Thank you Jørn Støylen! That's been driving me crazy for weeks.
	Pablo 11.5.2010 05:44:03 Excellent, this really works. Uncontrolled spell check was annoying. Thanks a lot.
	martin 8.7.2010 08:50:32 Hey guys, thanks for sharing this. I have a question though. I found this part in my preferences file: "enable_spellchecking": true, "ntp": { "promo_image_remaining": -3, "promo_line_remaining": -3 }, I tried to change "true" into "false" and it seems the spell checker is off. So after change: "enable_spellchecking": false, "ntp": { "promo_image_remaining": -3, "promo_line_remaining": -3 }, Is it ok to do the fix this way? It seems to work for me so far.
	Jørn Støylen 15.7.2010 13:50:54 martin: I didn't find "enable_spellchecking" in my prefs file, but I inserted it in the "browser" section (where the "ntp" section is), and it seems to have worked! That's an even better solution than mine.
	andrei 15.7.2010 14:35:43 Martin, many thanks, your solution is brilliant!!!!!!!!!