One way out of this is to use the program ispell which is an interactive spelling checker. When the filename ends in a .tex, ispell ignores things that start with backslash. It will often give you suggestions about how to correct the spelling. The main things you need to know to use ispell are: ? to get a list of commmands, i (ignore) to keep a word as is, r to replace a word and the number of a selection to replace the word with that selection. When you tell ispell to ignore a word, the word will be placed in your personal dictionary (a file called .ispell_words). Words in this file will be treated as correctly spelled in all future spelling checks. If you want to ignore a word and not put it in your .ispell_words, you can use a instead of i .