Google Spell Check

a Sublime Text package

Package Control: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Google%20Spell%20Check

Description

Use Google magic to fix spelling. Select some text (or just put the cursor on a word), run the command, and the text is silently replaced with Google's recommended spelling. If Google has no clear correction, your text is left alone.

Google has a far better spell checker than most tools:

1. Frequency — Google sees misspellings all day long, so it knows what you probably meant
2. Names — company names like flikr or tumblr, or scifi author jon sculzi → john scalzi; typical checkers look one word at a time and have no idea
3. Unlimited dictionary — kubernetes, hackathons, craigslist
4. Context — the whole phrase is considered, not each word alone
5. It just works — Sublime's built-in checker has no idea what to do with avalible, finanicals, maitenence

How to Use

1. Select some text, or put the cursor on a word
2. Run Google Spell Check
   • hotkey ctrl+alt+g
   • right-click context menu → Google Spell Check
   • Command Palette (ctrl+shift+p / cmd+shift+p) → Google Spell Check
3. The status bar shows progress, then the correction

Multiple cursors/selections are all checked in one go. Capitalization is preserved (Avalible → Available, AVALIBLE → AVAILABLE).

If nothing changes, Google thinks your spelling is fine. Select more words to give it context.

How It Works

This uses Google's public autocomplete/suggest endpoint (suggestqueries.google.com), which returns explicit spell-correction metadata — Google marks “you typed X, I think you meant Y”. That flag is what makes silent replacement safe: without it, the plugin doesn't touch your text.

When Google doesn't flag anything, a suggestion is accepted only if it reads as a respelling — same word count, small per-word edit distance, same first letter. This is what stops Google from “correcting” receive into received, or the quick brown fox into the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Some misspellings are invisible at phrase level: for additionassl microcontrollers Google only offers to extend the phrase, though additionassl alone corrects cleanly. So when the phrase as a whole yields no correction, each word is checked on its own (words under 4 characters are skipped, punctuation and spacing are preserved).

No API key required. It isn't an officially supported API, so Google changing their response format could break the plugin.

Tests

tests/test_correct.py runs the correction logic against the live endpoint, stubbing the sublime modules so the plugin imports outside the editor:

python3 tests/test_correct.py

Needs a network connection. Covers misspellings that must be corrected, correctly spelled text that must be left untouched, case preservation, and offline input guards.

Installation

• Package Control (recommended): Package Control: Install Package → Google Spell Check
• Manual: clone into your Sublime Packages folder “bash git clone https://github.com/noahcoad/google-spell-check.git "Google Spell Check”

Requires Sublime Text 3 or later (Python 3.3+ plugin host).

## Update Notices
* *2026-07-27* (**v2.0.0**), rewritten for Python 3 / ST4. The old version scraped the Google search results page for "Did you mean" — Google removed that markup, so it silently stopped working. Now uses the suggest endpoint's spell-correction metadata, falls back to per-word checking, checks all selections at once, preserves case and spacing, and reports connection failures instead of failing quietly. The `st2` and `st3` branches are retired; everything lives on `master`.
* *2013-10-14*, Sublime Text 3 version added.

## Finally
See also: [Open URL](https://github.com/noahcoad/open-url), another Sublime package.

Author: [@noahcoad](http://twitter.com/noahcoad) writes software for the heck of it and to make life just a little more efficient.