Red squiggle THIS, Word.

It may be just me, but when I’m barrelling along in Word, writing an email, or a blog entry, doing an assignment or, um, playing with the office assistant (Animate! Animate!), the appearance of the red squiggly line under something I’ve misspelled in my haste is quite irritating.

Except when I’ve spelt the word in question so wrong, the spell checker doesn’t even suggest it. That makes me laugh, and my mistake suddenly becomes awesome. It tricks Word. I know what it’s supposed to say, but Word is flummoxed. It frantically throws out random words that start with the same letter, hoping that it might get lucky and praying that it’s Mac equivalent doesn’t hear about this along the word processing grapevine.

These so-badly-spelled-they-are-by-default-awesome red squiggled words need a name.

I have given them one.

Misphantel / Mis – fan – tel

1. A misspelled word that is so poorly spelt no one but its author can discern what it means.

2. A word that by virtue of its appallingly bad spelling fools Microsoft Word into thinking it is another word entirely.

(n) Derivative: [Mistake, from Old Norse mistaka, to take in error ; Fantastic, Middle English fantastik, from Greek phantazesthai, to appear ; Spelling, Middle English spellen, to read letter by letter ]

"Hey, look, I made a misphantel!" Chuck a few extra s and t's into your word of choice and you too can live the dream. Don't overdo it - you don't want to end up with "No spelling suggestions". Word can be such a party pooper at times.

For those of you who’d like a word for your plain average red squiggly line, there already is one. Spelling Mistake.

Obviously.