Microsoft Teams Spell Check Not Working? Here’s How to Fix It

If you’ve ever sent a message in Microsoft Teams with a glaring typo and only noticed after hitting Enter, you know how frustrating it is when spell check quietly stops doing its job. The red underline just disappears one day, and suddenly every message feels like a potential embarrassment.

I’ve run into this myself, and I’ve seen it pop up constantly in Microsoft’s own Q&A forums. The good news? It’s almost always fixable. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through every method that actually works — from the simple one-click toggle to clearing the Teams cache and fixing Windows language settings.

Let’s find out why Microsoft Teams spell check not working by trying these 7 methods.

Why Does Teams Spell Check Stop Working?

Before jumping into the fixes, it helps to understand why this happens. Microsoft Teams doesn’t have its own built-in spell checking engine in the traditional sense. It relies on a combination of:

• The Teams app settings (Editor spell check toggle)
• Your Windows or macOS system language settings
• The Teams cache, which can get corrupted over time

So if any one of these three things goes out of sync, spell check can silently break. That’s why clearing the cache sometimes fixes it temporarily, but then it breaks again after an update — Teams pulls down new files that reset something in the background.

Now let’s fix it properly.

Fix Microsoft Teams Spell Check Not Working

Now I will show a different way to fix Microsoft Teams Spell Check; you can check based on your requirement.

Method 1: Enable Spell Check in Teams Settings

This is the first thing to check. It sounds obvious, but the spell check toggle in Teams can get turned off without you realizing it, especially after an update.

Here’s what to do:

1. Open Microsoft Teams on your desktop.
2. Click the three-dot menu (…) at the top right of the window (next to your profile picture).
3. Click Settings.
4. Under the General tab, scroll down to the Language section.
5. Look for Editor spell check — make sure the checkbox is ticked/enabled.
6. If you make any changes here, close and reopen Teams completely.

Once Teams restarts, open any chat and type a deliberately misspelled word like “helllo” or “teh”. You should see a red underline appear within a second or two.

If it’s already enabled but still not working, don’t worry — move on to the next method.

Method 2: Check Your Language Settings in Teams

Sometimes spell check is technically on, but Teams is checking the wrong language. If your system says one language and Teams is set to another, the checker gets confused and either underlines everything or nothing at all.

Here’s how to fix it:

1. Go to Settings > General in Teams (same as above).
2. In the Language dropdown, make sure it’s set to your actual working language — for example, English (United States) or English (United Kingdom).
3. If you change the language, Teams will usually prompt you to restart — go ahead and do that.
4. After restarting, test it again in a chat.

One thing I’ve noticed: if you’re in an organization where your IT admin has configured language policies, this dropdown might be greyed out. In that case, skip to Method 5 (contacting IT).

Method 3: Clear the Microsoft Teams Cache

This one is a lifesaver. A corrupted cache is one of the most common reasons spell check stops working in Teams — especially after an update. Clearing it forces Teams to rebuild everything fresh.

On Windows:

1. Completely quit Teams. Right-click the Teams icon in the system tray (bottom right) and select Quit.
2. Press Windows + R to open the Run dialog.
3. Type %appdata%\Microsoft\Teams and press Enter.
4. Inside this folder, delete everything except the meeting-addin folder (you can leave that one alone).
5. Restart Teams.

When Teams relaunches, it’ll rebuild the cache automatically. This takes a minute or two on first load.

On Mac:

1. Quit Teams completely from the menu bar or