Earlier today Eric told me that his mac knew (with the spell checking) both english and german but he didn't know what made it be that way. Since then I think I've found out how this happened. The way I did this was by opening TextEdit. When activating the CM in the open window and choosing Spelling->Spelling... I was given a dialog where I could choose what dictionary to check spelling with. Among the options were "Multilingual". I chose this so I could check against all languages. It seems to be working fine now. The initial spell check dictionary files live in "~/Library/Spelling", until I made this simple (and VERY helpful) change to my spell checker I had just one file in the folder named "en" for english. Now I have a second file named "Multilingual" in that folder to support that dictionary. This change will help me out a lot for Deutsch class here and Español class back at Crosswinds, but I also wonder if it has extended the spell checker's knowledge of English since I've seen reports of the main english spell checker on the mac being incomplete. I think I just found out what Eric somehow did on his mac to get the spell checker to act the way it is now.