No idea how that happened. When it happened, yesterday or Wednesday, every word was underlined in red. Since then I've had to add each one to the essentially empty dictionary. Any ideas from youse guys will be greatly appreciated. The only advantage to this catastrophe is it aids in precision editing--at least for typos. OpenOffice is the free version of Word. I've been using it for over a decade with no problem, until this.
Solved the problem by downloading the new free Word clone: Libre Office. Works fine, with a full dictionary!