Mac Sonoma 14.7.4, Scrivener for Mac 3.4
This is no longer showing spelling errors. When I ask it to check spelling, I get the dialogue box, but nothing there, nothing happens.
I’m not aware of anything I did to cause this. I have restarted twice and it still doesn’t work.
I also tried the suggestions from an earlier question.
I’ve never received an answer to this ask: why has spellcheck stopped working? How do I fix this?
Am I to understand that there is no way to fix this?
I’ve restarted the project many times; no improvement.
Any help?
Currently running Sonoma 14.7.4, Scrivener 3.4 (16639).
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It is a little annoying. And it’s kind of been that way for a very long time. Early spellcheck in Scrivener 3 seemed to work fairly reliably. But not for the last few macOS versions.
There also has not been a fix. Quite often I’ll get the dotted red line under a word Scrivener doesn’t recognize. But spellcheck does absolutely nothing.
A workaround that I found is to not use the Scrivener spellcheck feature, but to go into the drop-down menu, which on my Mac I have set to respond to a two-finger tap on the trackpad.
Then select ‘look up’, and that appears to circumvent whatever Scrivener brain fart would otherwise be involved.
I was under the impression that Scrivener just invoked spellcheck directly in the macOS. But maybe not. Because if you do it this way, it will faithfully attempt to spellcheck the word, apparently directly in the macOS, circumventing Scrivener’s constant brain fart.
For whatever reason, fixing this doesn’t appear to be a priority. Either that or it’s simply just above them.
Scrivener has nothing to do with spell checking, and yes Apple has busted it up pretty bad in the past two updates. “Look up” is not the spell check engine. We’ve already done everything we can to make it as reliable as possible, by removing what little code we had in place that attempted to fix other bugs.
I haven’t heard of that happening before, specifically. But as noted above, the troubleshooting for this is not straightforward because Scrivener is merely hosting the tools you see, and the automation that is supposed to underline words, or add suggestions to the contextual menu. There isn’t a lot you can do to fix that in Scrivener, for the same reason we can’t do much to fix it.
Normally, for interface bugs, we’d suggest reinstalling the software. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try that, it might work.
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I’ve been experiencing this error for weeks. I don’t know if it started after updating to Scrivener 3.5.2. The spell checker works fine in other applications (as TextEdit), but not in Scrivener. My Mac version is 15.7.3; will it be fixed if I update to 15.7.4? Given the reviews, I wouldn’t want to touch Tahoe with a pole.
Regards.
I wouldn’t expect a major change, but I suppose you never know. The issues I spoke of above have been around since 14.x came out, and exist in 26 too, so it would be a little surprising if a minor point fix in 15.x fixes it.
Now the larger problem of spell check suddenly not working at all, or maybe only working for a while and then failing during the session until a restart—that goes back ages, I think maybe as far back as Mac OS X 10.9? That’s about when I remember reports starting to crop up about it. We have no clue what causes that or how to avoid it. A problem like that seems to afflict one person consistently while the majority will never see it, and the one that does may see it spontaneously go away one year, or return four years later. Sorry to have no concrete notions on that one. We once spent a lot of time trying to figure it out, but it seems to be some mysterious aspect of Scrivener’s greater editor complexity that you won’t find in TextEdit or other simpler editing environments that use it.
For all types of problems, the workaround that always works is to use the spell check window and go through them all at the end of a writing session.
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Wait! I think I’m an idiot. I just realized I had the “Check Spelling While Typing” option disabled in the main menu. I probably disabled it by accidentally using the “Mac symbol + Ç” shortcut.
Phew, what a relief!
Thank you very much!
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Doh, forgot to ask if the monitor was plugged in. That would certainly make it all shut down. 
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I’ll say, as an excuse, that the shortcuts on Mac are terribly cumbersome (I’ve had to modify several to be able to use Scrivener) and very unsuitable for languages with special characters.
Regards.
Spellcheck has stopped working entirely for me 
I’m not sure for how long but at least a few weeks.
I’ve followed the troubleshooting instructions here; I’ve restarted (both the program and my computer) a few times through the weeks, so I don’t think it’s the known issue here either.
No red lines appear under misspelled words at all. When I try to run “Check Document Now”, nothing happens at all.
This is Scrivener 3.5.2 on macOS running Tahoe 26.2. Spellcheck still functions as usual on other programs (including as I’m typing this in Firefox, as well as Word) so I’m fairly sure this is a Scrivener-specific issue rather than a general setting somewhere on my Mac.
While not a crisis it is super annoying since I’d like something to call out the typos as I’m writing. Any ideas?
I am having this issue as well. I have tried the troubleshoot instructions and it still does not work. Spell check works in all the other apps on my Mac, but not Scrivener. I am using a MacBook Air M4 macOS Tahoe 26.4.1 and Scrivener 3.5.2. Thank you.