Spell check is your friend, but….
But, like many good friends, and even a best friend, there will be times when you fall out. Little quirks and habits on both sides which lead to dispute.
Look on it more as a slightly disreputable friend. You enjoy their company most of the time, but you wouldn’t blindly follow them into some of their activities.
Definitely use it for a swift check on your first drafts, it will highlight (mostly) any typos. Unless they happen to make another proper word which it blindly accepts. The spell checker does not read for sense or logic. Here’s an extreme example.
Thee too bares sniggled up on they’re din two hyphenate threw winter.
To my spell checker, and probably yours, this is all perfectly correct. To human eyes it most definitely isn’t, although your brain can probably work out what it should be. (The two bears snuggled up in their den to hibernate through winter.)
Obviously you’re unlikely to write a sentence that strangely spelt, but this is why you mustn’t blindly trust the spell checker.
There will also be times when you deliberately want a ‘wrong’ word, such as in conversation. Maybe one of your characters really does say that bears hyphenate, or mixes up ambidextrous and amphibious. Normally the spell checker will be your friend here and just accept the deliberately wrong word.
But… if you’ve misspelled either, let’s say amdextrous or amphibeos it will try to help, but the options it offers may be totally wrong. Top of the options list for amdextrous is adventurously. But it will make a good shot at correcting amphibeos.
Your knowledgeable but not particularly literary ‘friend’ can sometimes drop you deep in the mire.
The human eyeball and a functioning brain, plus a good dictionary, paper or online, should always be your final check. No matter how good your vocabulary or memory ‘if in doubt, check it out’. We probably all have at least a handful of words we somehow learned incorrectly, or some spellings which just won’t ‘stick’. It takes seconds to check if you know it’s one of your bogey words.
Treat online offerings like ‘the urban dictionary’ https://www.urbandictionary.com
with deep cynicism. They may be interesting places to visit, and to perhaps have your stomach turned at times, but they have little relevance for general writing.
I also suggest you think twice about adding dialect words to your spell checker’s dictionary, tempting though it is. Otherwise they may turn up where you least expect them. Far better to just tap the ‘ignore all’ option when one turns up in a passage of dialogue.
Summary: Spell checkers are useful tools, rather than an authority on spelling. But, like a skiving workmate, they tend to take the easy option and need close supervision to get the best from them.
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