If you use a mac and are into macros, shortcuts, customising things and generally making your computer do the kind of things you want it to do, I strongly recommend giving Keyboard Maestro a whirl.

If you're already using it, you might be familiar with the feeling once you've got your great macro together when you need to figure out how you want to trigger it. There are quite a few strategies out there - using special characters to denote a macro (eg. I use "@@h" as a shortcut for my home email address – apart from ocassionally using class variables when writing code in Ruby, I can't think of any instances where I'm likely to type "@@".) Sometimes, you might double the initial letter (eg. I use "ddate" and "ttime" to insert the current date and time, respectively.)

Once you've got some sort of idea of a trigger you want to use, this is a quick macro to see whether your chosen string of characters is going to appear inside any standard Engligh words.

Its pretty straightforward - I have this triggered when I type "ccheck", and it runs a simple one line shell script, which looks for what you typed into a dictionary file that comes built into most UNIX systems;

If there are no matches, you get a brief alert (which you can safely ignore) telling you that there are no matches. If anything does match, it will pop up in a window to let you know what words contain the string you had typed, so you can then decide whether you care or not.

I'm pretty sure that there will be a cleverer way of going about this (maybe using one of the "proper" OSX dictionaries), but this is more of a quick fix to stop me using something stupid that is going to get accidentally triggered than a guarantee that I'm never, ever going to trigger this by accident.

For example, it tells me that there are 5 words that include "ttime" – but I'm quite confident that I'm never going to type any of them.

Some Random Nerd