By Richard Mallion
Built into Mac OS X is a configurable system-wide local dictionary which has a list of correctly spelled words that are unique to you. Potentially any application can be developed to make use of this service. Specifically a lot of the Apple apps such as Mail and TextEdit do use it.
When the system detects a misspelled word, the word in question is underlined in red. If you right click and choose “Learn Spelling”, that specific spelling of that word is added to the dictionary for future use.
Its very easy to ‘Learn’ a word by mistake. Historically to remove a spelling, you would right click the word and choose unlearn which then removed that spelling from the dictionary.
As of Mac OS X 10.7 not all applications support the unlearn feature. For instance TextEdit does, but Mail does not.
So, if you add a spelling by mistake in Mail what can you do?
1. One option is to just switch to TextEdit, type the word and then right click it and select ‘Unlearn Spelling’.
This is fine but you will be surprised by how many custom spellings accumulate over time.
2. The second method allows you to bulk remove the incorrect spellings from the dictionary.
- In The Finder, hold the alt key and then from the Go menu, choose Library.
- In the Library folder locate a folder called “Spelling”. Inside this folder you will find a file called ‘LocalDictionary ‘. Double click the file to open it in TextEdit so we can edit it.
- Remove any words you don’t want. Then save and exit.
From experience you may have to log out and back in again, to pick up the changes.
Another use of this method is if you want to make sure certain words are in the dictionary on all your Macs. To do this just update one copy of the file ‘LocalDictionary’ with the spellings you want. Then distribute this file to all other Macs that require it.
Interestingly, on my Mac Pro running a fairly clean installation of Mountain Lion, the LocalDictionary file doesn’t seem to get updated. Instead, a file in the same directory called “en_GB”, which is of the same format, gets created and updated.
One thing which may have affected this is that my system language is set to British English, not the default English (which in this case means American English).
I am so hoping you could throw some light on an issue about spelling. I have a MacBook Pro mid 2009 and am running Entourage 2008 with the rest of Office in 2011 version. Things have been fine for years till suddenly, Spellcheck in Entourage started changing i’m to I’M. I have it set to correct it correctly, but it insists on capitalizing the ‘m’. It does not do that to any other declensions. A bit more investigating reveals that it is apostrophe plus the m which creates this, the ‘i’ is irrelevant. That is, any letter, or any combination of letters before the apostrophe, if followed by an ‘m’, makes the ‘m’ become capiltalized. This only happens in Entourage, not in any other app. After I tried to fix it by following your guidelines, above, Mail now thinks all lower case ‘i’m’ is OK and does not flag it up as a spelling error now. I can live with that since I never use Mail, but naturally ‘I’m’ is a very common word in emails and it’s driving me mad that I can’t change it in Entourage automatically. I see some other clues that a degree of corruption may have entered the system but it woukd take too much space and your time to describe. I’d just be grateful if you could throw out some ideas for the apostrophe followed by capitalized M problem.
Dear Mary,
I would first suggest creating a New user login ( > System Preferences > Users & Groups or > System Preferences > Accounts), logout of your existing user account, login as the new user.
Open Entourage and compose a new email. Don’t worry about setting up your email under this new user login as we only need to check the spelling/grammar check. Within the newly composed email type I’m, does it still auto-correct?
Anton
Hello Anton,
I was about to say “I’ve tried that over and over again and it’s fine”. However, I thought i’d give it one more go after your question, having done some trawling, dumping resetting of all kinds files. Lo & behold, the fault does not occur in the new user. So, evidently some sort of setting problems within my normal user log-in. I’ve tried setting, unsetting, resetting and junking so many variations of the preferences, auto-correct etc.. I no longer have any idea of what’s left to do or undo! I hope you may have some bright ideas…..
May