Can't get my Scrivener to learn certain words on Macbook Pro

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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If everything is working correctly, you should be able to right-click on the word that is incorrectly not marked as an error, and you will find an “Unlearn” command at the very top of the contextual menu.

Otherwise, you might need to look around a bit for where the spelling file really is. Apple keeps moving it around, from one year to the next it seems. This year for me it seems to be in ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.AppleSpell/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary. Before it was in the much easier to find ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary. Before that it was in ~/Library/Spelling/en_GB (or whatever localisation is applicable). Before that it was somewhere else I think. So it depends on what version of macOS you are using.

Troubleshooting steps...

Here is how I can verify results (on macOS 15.2):

  1. Open Scrivener and Terminal together.

  2. In Scrivener, type “asdfhalsd” into the text editor and let it mark it as incorrect.

  3. Right-click and learn it.

  4. In Terminal, type:

    cd ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.AppleSpell/Library/Spelling
cat LocalDictionary

    This prints the file to the terminal, and we can find the test phrase within it.

  5. Back in Scrivener, right-click on the word and unlearn it.

  6. In Terminal, use the second ‘cat’ command again.

    The test phrase is no longer present.

If that file does not exist, or you do not see anything in it, then you could try:

cd ~/Library
grep -R 'asdfhalsd' Spelling/*
grep -R 'asdfhalsd' Group\ Containers/*

No need to run the second one if the first finds something (prints the phrase in response). The second command may take some seconds to complete, but if it finds it, you’ll see the full path to a file name followed by the phrase, like so:

Group Containers/group.com.apple.AppleSpell/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary:asdfhalsd

(You will need to read closely, as you will no doubt hit a bunch of “permission denied” errors, There are, evidently, areas of your own personal user configuration folder that you aren’t allowed to even look at. :roll_eyes: )

And now you know where to look in the future.

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