The Sea of Red Squiggles
Google Docs features an active spell-checking engine that constantly scans your document as you type. If it encounters a word that does not exist in its primary dictionary, it automatically highlights it with a glaring red squiggly underline. While this is essential for catching typos in formal essays, it becomes a visual nightmare if you are writing a sci-fi manuscript filled with made-up alien names, a technical document laden with specialized coding acronyms, or a creative piece that intentionally uses phonetic slang. Staring at a document covered in red lines is highly distracting and can severely disrupt your creative flow.
Hiding the Spelling Errors
To clean up your document’s appearance and stop Google Docs from automatically highlighting misspelled (or unrecognized) words with red lines, you must disable the visual component of the spell checker.
Open the Google Docs document that you are currently editing. Navigate to the top menu bar and click on Tools. Hover your cursor over the very first option, Spelling and grammar. A secondary menu will slide out to the right. Look at the bottom of this secondary menu for the option labelled Show spelling suggestions. By default, there is a checkmark next to this option, indicating it is active. Click on Show spelling suggestions to remove the checkmark. Immediately, all the red squiggly underlines throughout your entire document will vanish. Google Docs will still technically know the words are misspelled, but it will stop visually harassing you about them until you manually run a spell check.