Yale: Can you check that the two dictionaries have been downloaded? They should be in your profile directory. For example, here's what I have on my machine:

[user@hostname]$ ls ~/.config/*chrom*/Dictionaries/
~/.config/chromium/Dictionaries/:
en-US-8-0.bdic

~/.config/google-chrome-beta/Dictionaries/:
en-US-7-1.bdic

~/.config/google-chrome/Dictionaries/:
en-US-7-1.bdic  en-US-8-0.bdic

~/.config/google-chrome-unstable/Dictionaries/:
en-US-7-1.bdic  en-US-8-0.bdic

I remember finding the chromium dictionary folder empty! I will have to double check when I return home and get back to you.

What I did to try to troubleshoot this:

1. Delete my ~/.config/chromium folder completely and re-sync my profile.
2. Uninstall/purge and reinstall.
3. Grab and install the Chrome .deb to try it.
4. Grab related chromium packages (chromium-l10n).
5. Add languages under the spell check settings (I don't know what I had originally, but I added the US and Canada specific languages).

In my first screenshot, I find the fact that English is turned off, and cannot be turned on to be odd.

Thanks for the attention! I'll confirm later on.

/home/yale/.config/google-chrome/Dictionaries/

/home/yale/.config/chromium/Dictionaries/

Yale: What does the following command output for you?

[username@hostname]$ curl https://redirector.gvt1.com/edgedl/chrome/dict/en-US-8-0.bdic

You can also click on the link and see whether the file is downloaded. This is our CDN that stores all of the spellcheck dictionaries. In the past, we've seen some firewalls block this CDN for some reason.

yale@Talos:~$ curl https://redirector.gvt1.com/edgedl/chrome/dict/en-US-8-0.bdiccurl: (7) Failed to connect to redirector.gvt1.com port 443: Connection refused

This site can’t be reached
redirector.gvt1.com refused to connect.

How annoying. I'll grab these files from a friend. Thanks :)

Oh. Uh... I figured it out.

@rouslan: Do we have a bug somewhere to surface that we can't download dictionaries?

No... this was my bad. I blocked this domain in my hosts file.

Would be nice if this didn't fail silently but ... My apologies for taking up your time here. Please close this bug.

Marking this issue as WontFix as per comment #12.
Please feel free to raise a new bug if any issues are observed on the latest Chrome builds.

Thanks..

Rachel: I filed  https://crbug.com/820456 .

Thank you for helping us troubleshoot this, Yale, and sorry about the silent failure. We will work on making this failure more verbose and easier to troubleshoot. Have a great day!