Since I last installed Gentoo, I noticed spellchecking in many applications weren’t working - notable Pidgin and Xchat. It’s a necessity! You need to come off as someone who knows how to spell while chatting!

It seems the problem was with myspell - the English dictionary for some reason was not installed. So, it was a simple fix:


emerge myspell-en


Restart the programs and it should work. It may also help to ensure you have your LINGUAS variable set in make.conf. For example:


LINGUAS="en_US en"