What are the wavy coloured lines when filling in forms in Chrome?

Q  I love using the Chrome web browser because the interface is clean and it works fast. However, when I’m filling in online forms, for example, some words are underlined with a red-coloured wavy line.

The appearance and frequency of these zigzags seems pretty random to me. At first I thought it might be a spell-checker or something, because I’ve seen similar lines in Microsoft Word, but the underlines are sometimes under words that I know are correctly spelt.

Have you got any ideas?
Darren Sparrow

A  Yes, this is indeed the handiwork of Chrome’s built-in spell-checker. And the reason it is underlining words that are correctly spelt is because, by default, it uses an American dictionary (so it would underline ‘coloured’ rather than ‘colored’, for example).

To fix this, or disable the spell-checker, click the spanner icon at the top right of the Chrome window and choose Options from the dropdown menu. Now click Under the Hood on the left-hand side and then click the ‘Languages and spell-checker settings’ button in the centre of the page.

To disable the spell-checker, click to remove the tick from the ‘Enable spell checking’ box. Alternatively, to have it work in English, click Add, choose ‘English (United Kingdom)’ from the list then click OK.

Now click the new ‘English (United Kingdom)’ entry in the Languages list then click ‘Use this language for spell checking’. Close the dialogue by clicking the small cross (‘x’) at the top right.