HTML spellcheck attribute

— 2 minute read

Did you know HTML has a spellcheck attribute? It tells the browser if it should spellcheck an area or not.

It's as simple as adding the spellcheck attribute to an element.

It will look like this:

HTML Spellcheck attribute

HTML Spellcheck attribute

We will use the contenteditable element, I'll make one with spellcheck and the other not.

<p contenteditable="true" spellcheck="true">
  Did you knoww you can click me to edit my contentz?
</p>
<p contenteditable="true" spellcheck="false">
  Did you knoww you can click me to edit my contentz
</p>

As you can see, both paragraphs have the contenteditable tag, but one has the spellcheck true and one not.

This now allows us to have the native spellchecker on the top one.

Note: Grammarly will still work on both!

You can have a play with the following Codepen to try it out.

See the Pen HTML spellcheck attribute by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

Browser support

The spellcheck attribute has good support. You can see partial support in some browsers, mainly depending on which tag you use the spellcheck attribute.

HTML spellcheck browser support

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