nospell

nospell is a flag or directive used in text processing environments to disable spell checking for a portion of text or an entire document. It is not a standalone program, but a convention adopted by various editors and tooling to prevent legitimate technical terms, code identifiers, or foreign words from being flagged as misspellings.

In Vim, nospell is an option that can be applied to a buffer or region to turn off the built-in spell checker. The command setlocal nospell disables spell checking for the current buffer, and many users embed the setting in a file’s modeline so the behavior persists when the file is reopened. As a result, editors that support modelines often recognize nospell as a signal to suppress spelling checks for the annotated text.

In Emacs, spell checking is typically controlled by modes such as flyspell or ispell. To disable spell checking for a specific file, users may employ local variables or mode toggles, for example by setting flyspell-mode to -1 in a file’s Local Variables section. This allows specialized text, such as code blocks, API names, or technical terms, to bypass automatic spelling rules.

Across editors and documentation pipelines, nospell may appear as a file-local or region-local annotation. It is language- and tool-specific, and there is no universal standard. The directive is commonly used to reduce false positives and improve readability in technical documents, source code, or multilingual content. Users should consult their editor’s documentation to implement nospell correctly in their workflow.