Thunderbird spellchecker

[#1]

How? do you get the spellchecker in Thunderbird (and Firefox) to work?
Several times I've been through the download of English (british) in Thunderbird, and left with "restart Firefox to complete installation" but the button for this remains greyed out. The default English (US) doesn't work either. Although the "Spell" abc button appears in the Thunderbird "write" toolbar. Deliberately misspelling words produces...nothing at all.
Seems a bit odd, as Firefox wasn't open in the first place during the attempted installation, as I was doing this in Thunderbird, and Firefox doesn't seem to have the install spellcheck option anyway.
Am I perhaps just not waiting long enough for the greyed out button to become live (several minutes so far) or am I missing something devious in the whole procedure? Or indeed am I expecting it to work like the spellchecker in Word, and it doesn't?

[#2]

Quote from: petlew

How? do you get the spellchecker in Thunderbird (and Firefox) to work?

I had this problem as well, took me ages before I tried opening Tools/Addons in Thunderbird.
Install the English Dictionary as an Addon.
Cheers Neil

[#3]

Interesting, but having gone through the download procedure again, which seems identical to the process I've used up till now except it's started from a drop down menu rather than from the Mozilla website, I have the British dictionary on my desktop but after following the procedure I end up with a message that it's not compatible with my version of Thunderbird. Please Neil, I'm not ungrateful for your advice, but it didn't seem to work.
Let me give an example of the problem I'm having; in this post within Firefox. I spelt British with a lower case b, the spell checker correctly underlines it as a spelling error (it should be upper case) But that's as far as it goes, having identified the error the spell checker gives no indication of what or where to go next to correct it, I've tried highlighting the error word, but can find no option in any menu to deal with it. The problem is worse in Thunderbird, as it doesn't even underline to errors. As a matter of interest it also underlines spelt as an error, which it isn't, not in British English anyway.
Oh oh, hang on a mo! purely by accident I've discovered that in Firefox RIGHT clicking an error word, brings up a list of corrected options. But this still doesn't work in Thunderbird.

[#4]

Thunderbird doesn't handle installs as neatly as Firefox does, especially if you also use Firebox as your main browser. So, to get the British English Dictionary installed in Thunderbird, visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/browse/type:3 in your browser. Ignore the big green Install button but look further down the list of dictionaries. Do not left-click on the Install link (especially if you're using Firefox as it will install it only for that -- this is where people come unstuck); rather, right-click, Save As..., download to Desktop.
From within Thunderbird: Tools > Add-ons... Extensions tab, click Install..., browse to Desktop, select the file (should be version 1.19). There you go.

[#5]

Ah! that's great, thanks very much.

[#6]

Some who think I'm a complete moron missing the fairly obvious right click, should know I take some comfort from that in the first instance I was trying to set this up on my wifes laptop. She bless her is partially disabled, and has an unfortunate habit of accidentally pressing the right mouse button because she can't feel anything in her fingers, the right button is disabled for her, and I forgot.

[#7]

I never thought you were a moron for one second It's not always clear on specific add-ons functionality, and none of the community here would have a problem with explaining anything to those that didn't know (well, I'd hope no-one would have a problem!)
Glad you got everything sorted.

[#8]

Thanks Mike, I appreciate that.