Windows 11 Notepad adds spell check and auto-correction for the first time in 41 years

Microsoft has been quietly rolling out spellcheck and autocorrect features to Windows 11 Notepad over the past few days. The Verge.

These additions were in limited preview testing in March, but are now available to everyone. This is quite surprising, since Notepad has been around in some form since 1983 and has only offered spell checking. now.

It seems to work much the same way as in Microsoft Word, where the squiggly line under a misspelled word is the key to right-click and correct it. The Verge points out that you can turn off spell checking and autocorrect for individual file types (mainly coding-related ones), or you can turn it off altogether.

Notepad wasn’t originally designed as a long-form writing tool with spell-checking capabilities, but if that’s what you want to use it for, now you can.