Hi,
I’m new to using Scrivener (and loving it so far!) but one small issue is that whenever I open Scrivener, the spell check seems to be set to US English. I’ve set it to British English, which works for the rest of that particular session, but whenever I close Scrivener and re-open it, it always defaults back to US English.
How can I change the spell check language once and for all?
Thanks in advance.
Just to mention that I’ve checked the “Language and Region” settings on my Mac (as it occurred to me that perhaps Scrivener was picking up my system language settings) but those were already set to use “English (UK)”, so I don’t know why Scrivener keeps reverting back to US English each time it launches?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I have a dim memory of this once saving per-application preferences, but it definitely does not seem to any more, based on what I’m seeing. That it is not following your system settings on the other hand is puzzling. That should not be related to Scrivener specifically, this setting is wholly within the domain of the system.
You should try in another program, like TextEdit, and you’ll probably get the same results. For me all software always loads up in accordance with the Keyboard system settings panel, regardless of what you set it to last. If for some reason you get a different result than I do (I’m looking at macOS 15.x at the moment, who knows if this is a one-year bug fixed later, or broken years ago), then the only place I think the system would store this is in Scrivener’s own preference file. You could try resetting that.
You might need to search or ask on the Apple discussion forums, if nobody around here knows how to fix that.
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Thanks for the reply — I will look into Scrivener’s own preference file.
Just to be clear: the “Language and Region” settings on my Mac are not changing; they are (correctly for my use) staying set to British English. I mostly mentioned the Mac system settings here to avoid someone replying with “make sure you’ve not got your Mac system settings set to us US English”).
It’s just that every time I launch Scrivener, the spellcheck picks up British spellings (e.g. “neighbour”) as incorrect because it’s evidently set to use US English.
So to clarify, you’ve checked in TextEdit and get the correct result there? If so, I do think resetting Scrivener’s plist file is the way to go, even though it doesn’t seem to actually store the setting anywhere that I can tell. Maybe it’s supposed to, but isn’t working right any more (big surprise, spell checking code quality has tanked ever since macOS 14.x), but somehow it got jammed before it stopped working and now it can’t update it (the part that’s broken for me on 26), but always reads the jammed value if there is one.
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I’ve just worked this out — and it was down to my Mac system settings (not Scrivener). 
Apologies!
I’ll post details below in case it helps anyone else in the future.
I had originally looked in my Mac System Settings and had checked the following two places:
- System Settings > Language & Region > Preferred Languages — which was correctly set for me to “English (UK) — Primary”
- System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input > Input Source — which was correctly set for me to “British”
The setting that I had overlooked was here:
- System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input > Edit… and in the modal window that then opens, the Spelling setting was set to US English.
I’ve now changed that to “British English” and Scrivener now no longer underlines British English words such as “colour, travelled, centre, etc.) as spelling mistakes.
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Thanks for the update! Yes that last setting is the only one that matters for this. One typically doesn’t deal with it as I think the whole wizard you go through on a brand new installation does a single-shot region+keyboard+spelling setup depending on what you choose then. But after that point, all three settings are definitely independent. You can have a Spanish UI, US/ISO keyboard and English_UK spelling if you want (as I happen to know from experience).
Now the real question is why this and other important input settings are so buried. 
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