I am editing a book for a friend; he recently found a few hundred letters to the editor that he wants me to turn into a book detailing his political philosophy. While working on that yesterday, I was trying to get the worst of the spelling errors out of the way. Some are his, and some are because we scanned his typed hard copy and ran it through an OCR program, which is always an iffy proposition.
The spellcheck comes to Khada-fy, and I get several options (none of which is to close up the two parts of the name) that read thusly:
Khayyam
Khalif
Khalid
Khazar
Khartoum
Dickhead
Some might argue, and persuasively, that this list provided all the alternatives I needed under the circumstances. I think, however, it better serves as a reminder that word processing programs have terribly limited, if occasionally intriguing, spelling capabilities. Proceed with caution.
Interesting. I use OpenOffice and I wondered if it would do what Word did. I pasted “Khada-fy” into a document and right-clicked it. It suggested these four:
Khayyam
Khalid
Bulkhead
Lunkhead
Presumably your “dickhead” and my “lunkhead” are preferred sobriquets for the Libyan character your author actually intended. I can’t imagine what “bulkhead” is there for, except that it shares the “kh” letter sequence.
Actually, I was using OpenOffice Writer 3.0 for this project. MS Word 2000, the version I have, doesn’t offer any suggestions.