I consider myself to be good at spelling. Nah, fantastic.
It's probably due to several things (all those assignments, all that touch-typing...), but all you need to know is that it's good, well fantastic.
Though, as with everything in life, there's always a time that your knowledge doesn't stretch far enough - in this case, you have to double-check the spelling.
Fair enough, I'd just grab the nearest dictionary. But I don't have one. In this digital age that we live in, books are a bit rare - with dictionaries being even rarer. On the otherhand, we do have computers - dictionaries with circuits if you like.
I tend to just open up Microsoft Word, and type in the word(s) as best as I can. But there's two problems with this... the first is that Microsoft is American. So by default, the dictionary is setup as US English. This problem can easily be overcome if setup properly prior to spell-checking.
The second problem is that Word is almost in its twelth revision, and with each version it appears to become more and more bloated. I'm not kidding when I say I used to benchmark PCs on the speed that Word 2000 opened. I remember my previous laptop getting around 20 seconds.
The alternative to Word is Google.
Google, however, is a website - so a browser such as Internet Explorer, or (even better) Firefox is needed. But, if you're like me, you most likely have at least one browser open at any one time. So it's a quick alt-tab and a search on Google that solves your spelling woes.
Though one day soon, Google will probably accept my stupid spelling mistake, and let me carry on with my search... when that day comes, I should look for an open source stand-alone spell checker (if there is such a thing). Though I'll still need Google to look for it.