An approach is provided that receives words that are input by a user of an application with the words being displayed on a display device. Each of the words are compared to words from a dictionary. Based on the comparisons, words that are not found in the dictionary and only appear a single time are highlighted as being misspelled words. However, words that are not in the dictionary but appear multiple times in the document are highlighted differently to indicate that these words are possible misspelled words with the difference in highlighting allowing the user to easily discern between misspelled and possibly misspelled words.