[Today's post is authored by Andrew Greene, the developer responsible for bringing a host of new languages to Buzzword.]

We at Buzzword have always realized that the first two “W”s in www stand for “world-wide,” and we’ve been looking forward to the day when we could provide spell-checking in languages other than the dialect of English used here in the U.S.

One of the advantages of being a part of Adobe is access to a lot of world-class resources, including the spelling dictionaries that Adobe has licensed for use in our desktop products. With this week’s upgrade to Buzzword, we are pleased to respond to the many requests you’ve sent in asking for spell-checking in more languages.

You may notice some subtle changes in our UI to make room for this feature. The “misspelled word” count in the lower-right corner now flies out to give you access to the current language. We’ve got 19 different dictionaries to choose from.

What if your language still isn’t one of the ones we support? Previously, you had the option to turn off the display of the red underline that indicates a misspelled word, but Buzzword was still taking the time to spell-check your documents. Why? Because this is a personal display preference, and you might share the document with someone else who hasn’t chosen that setting.

So we now also support “No language — Don’t spell check this document” as an option. This has three big advantages over the old way:

1. Buzzword won’t take the time to mark your document with red underlines that you won’t see anyway.
2. When you share a document, you don’t have some people seeing the underlines and others not.
3. If some of your documents are in different languages, you can enable spell-checking for the documents in a language for which we have a dictionary, and leave it off for the others.

We know that we still have more work to do to be truly “world-wide.” You can expect to see our user interface get translated fairly soon, and we’re working on expanding our font support to go beyond the “Latin-1” subset. Support for languages written right-to-left or vertically is something some of you have asked for; although those are harder problems and will take longer, we do hope to get there eventually.

It’s been a lot of fun working with the folks here at Adobe who speak various languages to test this new feature, and after reading all the feedback and forum messages asking for this feature, I’m excited to know that we’re going to make a lot of you happy with this. Please let us know how it works out for you!