147 $20 words that MS Word does not know

Do you love big words? Love your Theory words? Then you’ve probably noticed that MS Word likes to underline a lot of your prose in red. For some reason their dictionary is not as complete as it should be given the ubiquity of the software in academic settings. I wonder why that is?

Here is a list of 147 words that appear in books published by Litwin Books and Library Juice Press that get dinged by the MS Word spell-check. We like these words and find them useful. There is nothing Orwellian, exactly, in Microsoft’s smallish vocabulary; we aren’t stopped from using the words that aren’t in its dictionary. But it makes me wonder, where does the dumbing-down start and where does it end?