I've been using google as a spell checker for a while. If I'm not sure of the proper speling of a word I run a search with google and most of the time google will reply with "Did you mean: spelling.

So reading in the docs of the new Google's APIs that they are somehow supporting the feature got me somehow more interested.

While checking my referrals page (as any good weblogger constantly does ;), I found that Jake Savin had misspelled my name on his weblog. Click: idea.

Checking my name spelling on google I got the right suggestion.

What this mean is obviously that google is not checking words' spelling against a somehow fixed dictionary, but against words somehow frequently used on the whole web.

Probably somebody could elaborate this further, but while all dictionaries have always been lagging behind real-world usage of words, google is actually registering it in almost real time.

This means that if enough people decide to invent a new word, most probably the word will start going trough the google spell checker. It also means that this system is totally language independent, provided that there are enough web pages in that language.

I agree that if you start searching for your misspelled name on google most probably you should seriously consider some kind of medical help