The Sea of Red
Google Docs includes a robust, always-on spellchecker. As you type, it constantly compares your words against its internal dictionary. If it detects a word it doesn’t recognize, it automatically underlines it with a jagged red squiggly line. While helpful for standard writing, this is incredibly distracting if you are writing a document filled with highly technical jargon, medical terminology, fantasy character names, or code snippets. The document quickly becomes a sea of red ink, making it difficult to read and masking actual, legitimate typos that you might need to fix.
Silencing the Spellchecker
To clean up your document visually and stop Google Docs from automatically underlining perceived spelling errors, you must disable the real-time spelling and grammar suggestions.
Open your Google Docs document. Navigate to the top menu bar and click on Tools. From the drop-down menu, hover your cursor over Spelling and grammar. A secondary menu will slide out to the right. In this secondary menu, you will see an option labelled Show spelling suggestions, which usually has a checkmark next to it indicating it is active. Click on this option to remove the checkmark. All the red squiggly lines in your current document will instantly vanish. (Note: You can also uncheck “Show grammar suggestions” here to remove the blue squiggly lines). The spellchecker is now turned off; Docs will no longer highlight errors as you type.