Ursa Spell Checker for Skype

Ursa Spell Checker is a small program that brings free spell checking to your favorite VoIP and chat application – Skype - for embarrassment free chatting. Like Word processors (and nowadays, browsers), Ursa Spell Checker highlights spelling errors with a wriggly red line underneath the misspelled words. Right click on the highlighted words to reveal a menu with a number of suggestions. Choosing the correct spelling from those suggested immediately replaces it with the chosen word.

Ursa Spell Checker runs as a background process separate from your Skype program. After you launch the spell checker you will need to enable it by pressing the appropriate hotkey combination, before you can start using it. Ursa Spell Checker always launches with spell checking disabled by default, which is an odd behavior in my opinion.

If you start Ursa Spell Checker you obviously want to spell check, so making the user go through an additional step is bad design. The ability to enable or disable spell checking with the press of a keyboard button is a good feature, no doubt, as it allows you to turn off the thing if it starts bothering you. But it needs to be enabled you default.

Ursa Spell Checker is also a multi-language spell checker that uses dictionaries from the Open Office project. The program comes with the English dictionary pre-installed. Additional dictionaries can be easily downloaded and installed from the program settings. Dictionaries for a total of 88 languages were available at the time of this writing.

When using Skype with Ursa Spell Checker enabled, dictionaries can be switched quickly from the context menu.

Ursa Spell Checker is free but needs to be activated with a free activation code. You can try out the software without activating for 30 days.

Alternatively, you can use a universal spell checker that works on all windows programs such as TinySpell.

Related: 5 Free offline dictionaries for Windows