Thanks for the feedback on that. Since I would never dare give AutoCorrect
permission to use suggestions from the spelling checker, I was not seeing
this behavior.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Patrick Schmid" wrote in message
...
I have heard back from Microsoft on why this is happening. Word has an
AutoCorrect feature that automatically corrects text that you type. For
example, Word will automatically capitalize the first letter of a
sentence. It has a few other automatic correction settings to deal with
such specific issues. You can find them all in Tools, Auto Correct. This
dialog is language specific as you can see in the dialog title.
In that dialog, you will also notice that there is a table showing
certain text that should be replaced with certain other text. For
example, in English (U.S.) the table tells Word to replace "abbout"
automatically with "about". These are the AutoCorrect entries Suzanne
referred to in her reply. As she correctly noted, none of the names of
religions are in that list. If you want to have Word replace "muslim"
with "Muslim" and "islam" with "Islam", you can force Word to do so by
adding these pairs to that list.
However, if the names of religions are not in that list, why are some
still capitalized by default in Word? I don't know what the earliest
version of Word that had this feature is, but Word for sure capitalizes
"christianity" by default in 2003 and 2007.
The explanation is the setting on the bottom of the AutoCorrect dialog:
"Automatically use suggestions from the spelling checker". If that
settings is checked, then Word will replace "christianity" with
"Christianity", hence automatically capitalize the names of some
religions, but not all. What this setting does is replace a misspelled
word automatically with the suggested correct spelling, if Word can only
find one suggestion. To see what I mean, type e.g.: "Is christianity".
Then press the space bar. Word now automatically capitalizes the Word.
Now go into Edit you'll see that Undo is now called "Undo AutoCorrect".
Press it and Word will undo the capitalization of the Word and you'll
see the word underlined with the typical red squiggles of a misspelled
word. If you right-click on the word and see what spelling suggestions
Word offers, you'll notice that it only offers one, namely the word in
capitalized form. As Word was only able to find one spelling suggestion,
AutoCorrect changed your misspelled word automatically into that single
suggestion.
As Suzanne pointed out, "muslim" and "islam" come with more than one
spelling suggestion. For "muslim", Word suggests "Muslim" and "muslin",
for "islam" Word suggests "Islam", "island", "slam". As there is more
than one suggestion, Word does not automatically capitalize the words.
Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism are all words for
which Word cannot determine any other possible spellings except their
capital versions.
Therefore it might appear that Word discriminates against Islam, whereas
it just happens to be that the words are relatively short and have other
possible words "nearby", meaning Word can't assume that the user just
wanted the capitalized version.
My contact at Microsoft has already suggested to the person who is
responsible for this feature to have Word automatically capitalize a
word if the only difference between the word and one of the suggestions
is capitalization. It is probably too late though for this new feature
to appear in Word 2007.

I hope this explains why Word is behaving like that. If you have any
other questions about it, please let me know.

Patrick Schmid