My thought was to build a cursor of all words in a block of text and compare that cursor to a cursor containing a list of all words in a dictionary. The result should be a list of misspelled words.

I assume you have an index on the cWord field of the dictionary table - of course <s>. So try it with a relation:

...
* build a cursor "crsTextblock" with the words of a text block (eg a paragraph)
* eg: ALINES(aWords,cParagraph," ") ; select crsTextblock ; APPEND FROM Array aWords
...
use tabDictionary in 0 order cWord && index on field cWord, tagname cWord
select crsTextblock
set relation to cWord into "tabDictionary"
select * from crsTextblock where eof("tabDictionary") into cursor crsMisspelled

Bye, Olaf.