Disabling CSS Spell Checking with CSS

In this article, we’ll explain how to disable CSS spell checking. Spell checking is a feature that checks text for spelling errors, commonly used in HTML forms. However, sometimes you may want to disable the default spell checking feature or modify its behavior. CSS provides a simple way to do this.

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What is CSS Spell Check?

CSS spell check is a feature provided by browsers that automatically checks for spelling errors as text is entered. By default, browsers apply spell checking to all elements with the contenteditable attribute, including <input>, <textarea>, and <div>. When a user types a word that might be incorrect, the browser checks the word and displays a red wavy line below the input field to indicate the incorrect word.

How to disable CSS spell check?

To disable CSS spell checking, we can use the spellcheck attribute. The spellcheck attribute is an attribute that indicates to the browser whether spell checking is enabled. This attribute can be applied to any element with the contenteditable attribute.

Here is an example of disabling spell checking in an input field:

<input type="text" spellcheck="false" /> 

In the above example, we set the spellcheck attribute to false, which disables spell checking in the input field.

How to modify the CSS spell checking style?

In addition to disabling the CSS spell checking feature, we can also modify the default styles to change the appearance of the spell checking.

CSS provides some pseudo-class selectors to customize the spelling check style, including: ::-webkit-grammar-error, ::-webkit-spelling-error, ::-moz-spellcheck-word, and ::-ms-spellcheck-word.

Here’s an example of how to modify the style of a spellcheck error:

input[type="text"]::-webkit-spelling-error {
color: red;
text-decoration: underline;
}

In the above example, we set the color of spelling errors to red and underline them.

How do I enable spelling check for specific elements?

Sometimes, we may want to enable spelling check only for certain elements. To achieve this, we can set the spellcheck attribute to true for the relevant elements. By default, this attribute is set to default.

The following is an example demonstrating how to enable spell checking within a <textarea> element:

<textarea spellcheck="true"></textarea> 

In the above example, we set the spellcheck attribute to true, which enables spell checking within the <textarea> element.

Summary

In this article, we introduced how to disable spell checking with CSS. We learned how to use the spellcheck attribute to disable spell checking and demonstrated how to modify the spell checking style using CSS. Furthermore, we learned how to enable spell checking within specific elements. By understanding these concepts and examples, we can better control and customize spell checking functionality as needed.