The
VirtualWritingTutor and
GrammarFix websites use
Googie Spell from
Orangoo Labs to check spelling of text. The spell checker was added to help improve the accuracy of the grammar checker, which assigns a part of speech to each word submitted to the grammar checker so that powerful grammar rules can be employed when checking the grammar in a text. If a verb is spelled incorrectly, the system is unable to identify which verb it is and check whether it is conjugated properly. Equally, if a noun is spelled incorrectly, the system can tell if it is singular or plural.
It came as a shock and a disappointment to me when I received a message from teacher letting me know that the spellchecker did not work. I took a long text that a student had sent me, and sure enough, the spellchecker did not find a single error. I then set about to run a few tests. This what I discovered.
The Googie Spell spell checker stops working when paragraphs exceed 198 words in length.
 |
| With a paragraph containing 198 words, Googie Spell works perfectly |
 |
| With a paragraph containing 200 words, Googie Spell stopped working |
 |
The same paragraph containing 200 words, on the Orangoo Labs' Demo Page--same problem
|
Googie Spell can check the spelling without a problem with texts of 5 paragraphs of 198 words each, but starts to act erratically when you add a sixth paragraph of 198 words. As you can see below, it stops identifying my spelling error "twoo" after the second paragraph.
 |
| Googie Spell stops finding errors in the third 198-word paragraph when you give it 6 paragraphs of 198 words. |
I will look for another solution or place a warning on the website telling visitors about this newly discovered limitation.
