I have bought Scrivener and put it on both my desktop and laptop (I understand their license permits this), but I have “learned” a lot of custom spellings on the desktop that don’t show up on the laptop. Please could someone tell me what Scrivener’s user spelling dictionary is called, where it’s kept, and could its location be customised so that I could keep it in my Dropbox folder? Many thanks, Jim
I think what you are looking for is the Personal Word List
C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Local\Scrivener\Scrivener\wordlists.ini
For more info, see
https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/bulk-import-of-words-into-the-user-dictionary/25321/5
I don’t think the location can be customized. I could be wrong. Personally, I’d like to have the option of one stored for/within each project, so that it would travel with the project.
There might or might not be some DropBox trickery that one could do to sync/share the folder it is in between multiple machines, but personally, I’d be very hesitant about it. I suppose one could create some sort of batch file, macro, windows automator utility based procedure thingie that would copy the file back and forth.
There’s also the “aspell” dictionary that comes with Scrivener. If you dig down in the Scrivener program folder, there’s a folder there for that,but that’s not the “learning” Personal Word List dictionary that I think you are referring to. I would swear I’ve seen instructions somewhere, perhaps in that folder, for how one can add words the “aspell” dictionary, but can’t find it at the moment.
Hope that helps.
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The location of the wordlist.ini file can’t be changed in Scrivener, but there are ways to set up Dropbox to sync files outside the Dropbox folder using symbolic links. Essentially you’ll move the real file to Dropbox, and leave a linked file in the original location. I haven’t tried it for the wordlists specifically, but I can’t see any reason it wouldn’t work. You can find detailed instructions for setting up the symbolic link for Dropbox here.
I tried a symbolic link with the wordlist.ini file, and it did not work. Scrivener refused to recognize the file after it was changed on another machine and instead erased everything and created a new file.
What did work was a hard link, which seems to be frequently confused with a symbolic link (I was confused). From the command line, the mklink command with no switches creates a symbolic link, while mklink with the “/h” switch (mklink /h) produces a hard link, and that appears to work.
To create the link, i have a text file with the .bat extension. I have two commands in the text file:
del C:\Users[username]\AppData\Local\Scrivener\Scrivener\wordlists.ini
mklink /h C:\Users[username]\AppData\Local\Scrivener\Scrivener\wordlists.ini [Path to the folder containing the file in Dropbox]\wordlists.ini
To create the hard link I run the bat file, but as an administrator. That is important (right click, select Run As Administrator).
The del command will delete the existing file, so if you have a lot already in the file, move it over to the target folder in your Dropbox first.
By the way, if anyone is looking for this solution in 2025+, the location is now
C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Local\LiteratureAndLatte\Scrivener\wordlists.txt (note it’s no longer an ini file but a txt one which makes life a bit simpler).
Thanks very much for your help, I am also syncing workstations.
Ellen