Since automatic language detection of paragraphs doesn’t always work reliable in Word for Mac, I would like to try out a macro that scans each paragraph of a German document for any of the most frequent English words:

The most commonly used words

I would remove those words that exist in German too (an, oh, etc.).

First I would assign the German language to the whole document. Then the macro should scan each paragraph for approximately 480 words. If they are found, the paragraph will be set to English, to enable correct spell checking.

Is it possible to do this at a reasonable speed, since many checks will be performed?

Perhaps it is better to use the opposite approach: test each word in a paragraph for presence in the list? Since paragraphs will rarely have 480 words, not even in legal German .

Since I'm not sure that a limited list of words will always be sufficient, in each and every context, it would be a good idea to have the words in an easy to edit list. So that the user can easily add words, e.g. for academic papers with a lot of quotations.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.