I need to make sure that MS Word (the latest) absolutely will NOT make ANY automatic spelling corrections. I'm transcribing a 1550 English history chronicle with a zillion spellings of that era--in the whole book I've found only two lines a typesetter today would set the same way--so I need to make sure MS Word will not correct anything, anywhere, anytime, so Word doesn't impact the integrity of my project. I thought I turned off all such correction settings in Options/Proofing, but just now Word corrected "comming" to "coming." How do I tell Word to just stop it?

Mark all of the text to not check spelling or grammar. You can do this by Ctrl+A and then under the Review tab under Language > Proofing language, make sure the box to not check spelling or grammar is checked.


You can also do this with a character style for individual words or passages. Such a style is described toward the end of this Article:
Proofing Language Keeps Changing - Solutions - How can I keep my proofing language from changing?

Charles, thanks. Strangely, that Language/Proofing language option was already set to Not spell check, as you suggested. I will mark this query as solved for the time being but will keep an eye on Word making unwelcome automatic corrections and try to track down why it's doing that, via Language options.

Automatic corrections are not part of spelling check but AutoCorrect.
You can turn this off as well.
File > Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options (button)

The only thing Word 'corrects' of its own accord are spellings defined via AutoCorrect, and even that has no effect on content that has been copied and pasted into a document. And, as Charles posted, you can turn AutoCorrect off.

Aside from that, you can also avoid having Word correct your document's spelling via the simple expedient of not using spell-check and, even if you do, Word won't auto-correct any 'misspelling' unless you tell it to.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks for your expert help! I hope Word listens to me better than my cat.