Microsoft Word

**Microsoft Word** or **MS Word** (often called **Word**) is a graphical word processing program that users can type with. It is made by the computer company Microsoft. Its purpose is to allow users to type and save documents.

Similar to other word processors, it has helpful tools to make documents.
- Spelling & grammar checker, word count (this also counts letters and lines)
- Speech recognition
- Inserts pictures in documents
- Choice of typefaces
- Special codes
- Web pages, graphs, etc.
- Tables
- Displays synonyms of words and can read out the text
- Prints in different ways

Microsoft Word is a part of Microsoft Office, but can also be bought separately.

## History

The program was first released in 1981.
Many of the ideas and features in Microsoft Word came from **Bravo**, the first graphical writing program.
Microsoft bought the Bravo program, and changed its name to _Microsoft Word_.
When it first came out, it was not very popular, and did not sell as well as other writing programs like WordPerfect.
Although it was not very popular when it came out, it had a feature called _WYSIWYG_ (What You See Is What You Get), which meant that people can change the visual style of writing (e.g. bold, italics), by selecting and formatting text, when in other programs like WordPerfect, people had to add special 'codes' to change the style of writing. _WYSIWYG_ is now a common feature of all computer writing programs.

### Versions

There are versions for Microsoft Word for other operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows. New versions support fewer operating systems, although they always support Windows.

### For Microsoft Windows

- _Word for Windows 1.1_, for Windows 3.0 came out in March, 1990.
- _Word for Windows 1.1a_, for Windows 3.1 came out in June, 1990.
- _Word for Windows 2.0_, came out in 1991.
- _Word for Windows 6.0_, came out in 1993.
- _Word for Windows 95_ (sometimes called Word 7), came out in 1995.
- _Word 97_ (sometimes called Word 8), came out in 1997.
- _Word 2000_ (sometimes called Word 9), came out in 1999.
- _Word 2002_ (sometimes called Word 10 or Word XP), came out in 2001.
- Word 2007 which required Windows XP Service Pack 2.
- Word 2019 which is latest version of Microsoft Word to support Windows XP Professional 64-bit edition.

### For macOS

- _Word 1.0 for Mac_ came out on January 18, 1985.
- _Word 3.0 for Mac_ came out on January 31, 1987. (There was no "2.0" version.)
- _Word 4.0 for Mac_ came out on November 6, 1990.
- _Word 5.1 for Mac_ came out in 1992.
- _Word 2001_ was released in 2000.
- _Word 2004_ was released in May 2004.
- _Word 2008_ was released on January 15, 2008.
- _Word 2011_ was released in October 2010.

## Popularity

The program is very popular.

Without configuration the program saved the document in a proprietary file format, so other programs could not open it. When the user sent his document to a friend, the friend needed a copy of Microsoft Word to read the document. Then that friend would probably also save documents in the same secret format of Word. This gave Microsoft Word a dominant position.

## Other websites

- Official website
- www.office.com

## Infobox (software)

- **name**: Microsoft Word
- **screenshot**: Editing in Microsoft Word.png
- **logo**: Microsoft Office Word (2025–present).svg
- **logo size**: 100px
- **developer**: Microsoft
- **operating system**: Microsoft Windows
 macOS
- **latest release version**: Microsoft Office 2016, Microsoft Office 2019, or as part of Microsoft 365
- **genre**: Word processor
- **license**: Proprietary
- **website**: [http://office.microsoft.com/word Word Home Page - Microsoft Office Online]