Tag Archives: Spelling

How do you spell Dreidel? Shame on you Microsoft!

Posted on December 9, 2012 | 15 comments

First of all, I would like to wish everyone celebrating today a blessed Chanukah or Hanukkah. (I’ve found it spelled both ways) I don’t celebrate Hanukkah, but I appreciate the holiday, and its significance.

While I was writing a guest post this morning, I found myself smacking myself upside the head over the word “dreidel.” Why would I do such a thing?

Well, it seemed an easy enough word, but no matter how I tried to spell it, a wavy red line appeared beneath it (using the Microsoft Word program.)

So, I did a left-click on the word, all ready to choose the correct spelling. What came up?

Deride, derided, derides, dreaded, derider.

I don’t know about you, but I figured that I must have been SO DERN FAR OFF in my spelling that it couldn’t figure out which word I wanted. So I tried several different combinations. No dice.

Not to be thwarted in my holiday spirit, I copied the original spelling and went to Dictionary.com.

I pasted dreidel into the website, and low and behold…

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drei·del

/noun, plural drei·dels, drei·del.

a four-sided top bearing the hebrew letters nun, gimel, he, and shin, one on each side, used chiefly in a children’s game traditionally played on the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.

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You guessed it, I’d spelled it right to begin with.

Now, I ask. How the heck can a big company like Microsoft not have a simple word like dreidel in their spell-checker dictionary? SHAME ON YOU MICROSOFT!

And, I must now say, shame on WordPress too, because when I pasted this post into WordPress, I find it is being underlined here, too.

Soooooooo… This made me wonder. How many words have you come across that a spell-checker didn’t have on file?