About Grammar & Spell Checker

Check content for grammar issues, spelling mistakes, and style improvements. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Web / Frontend collection.

Use Cases

• Proofread blog posts and technical documentation before publishing.
• Check non-native English writing for common grammatical patterns to fix.
• Review email drafts for tone and formality before sending to clients.
• Verify marketing copy for consistent active voice and sentence length.

Tips

• Run the checker twice: first for grammar errors, then again after fixing them to catch secondary issues the first pass missed.
• Use the style suggestions separately from grammar — style is subjective; accept only the suggestions that match your intended tone.
• Paste one paragraph at a time for long documents to review issues in context rather than scrolling through a large error list.

Fun Facts

• The first computerized grammar checker, Writer's Workbench, was developed at Bell Labs in 1976 — it ran on Unix and checked for passive voice, sentence length, and readability.
• Microsoft Word's grammar checker, introduced in 1992, famously flagged 'I feel bad' as incorrect and suggested 'I feel badly' — a prescriptive rule that linguists widely consider a myth.
• Grammarly, launched in 2009, reached 30 million daily active users by 2022, making it the most widely-used grammar checking service ever — larger than any print style guide readership.

FAQ

Does it catch subject-verb agreement errors?

Yes — agreement errors, tense inconsistencies, article usage, and punctuation issues are all flagged. Complex nested clauses may occasionally be misanalyzed.

Does it check for style or just grammar?

Both — grammar errors are flagged as errors; style suggestions (passive voice, wordiness, adverb overuse) are flagged as warnings and are optional to apply.

Can it handle technical jargon?

Add domain-specific terms to the custom dictionary to prevent them from being flagged. Words in code spans (backtick-wrapped) are automatically excluded from spell-checking.