Introducing SpellingBee: The Entomological Spellcheck Dictionary

Entomologists are, like it or not, professional writers. Research articles, grant proposals, agency reports, lesson plans, and more all add up to a considerable chunk of our time—time many of us might prefer to spend outside catching bugs. Whatever our wants, our written work is too important to neglect for long, and for some of us, it is the metric by which our success is measured. Fortunately, writers today have access to more tools than ever to expedite the writing process. One of those tools, however, often feels like it’s working against us, not for us: the spellchecker. The spellchecker’s job is straightforward: underline spelling errors and suggest the proper spelling. It usually does a commendable job, but when the writing becomes too technical, it struggles to keep up. It flails about, indiscriminately underlining correctly and incorrectly spelled words with equal fervor, and offering absurd corrections with Dunning-Kruger–effect confidence. The underlines pile up and the page devolves into a mass of red squiggles. These false positives are not only distracting, but create a real burden because each must be manually reviewed in case they contain actual errors. Publishing a typo is embarrassing and in extreme cases could even confuse nomenclature (e.g., Marshall 2022; see ICZN art. 33.3.1).