emacs-28.2 -Q -nw --color=no s t o n k s M-$ 1 At this point, I expect to see the word "stonks" replaced with "stocks", but it is instead replaced with "stockstonks". The problem seems to be in ispell-highlight-spelling-error-generic, a 20th-century kludge from before face support for ttys was added in emacs-21 in 2001. It's been unnecessary since then, and it looks like it's been breaking ispell on colorless ttys since at least emacs-23. Changing "(display-color-p)" to "t" in ispell-highlight-spelling-error suffices to fix the bug.