Manually Editing My Custom Dictionary

Okay, (1) I’ve only had my Mac version of Scrivener for a couple of months and though I love it I am also still learning, (2) this might be my not knowing how to ask the question in forum searches here.

Anyway.

I’ve got some spellings that I have taught Scrivener to accept and which (for reasons, why else, LOL) I now wish to remove. The thing is, for the life of my and my old eyes, I can’t see the option to do that. Is the custom dictionary held somewhere so that I can edit it? Is there a menu or preferences option to let me at it? Is it, horror, not possible on my MacBook?

Please, you are my only hope…

The easiest way to do this is to write the obsolete words out again, right-click on them and press unlearn.

If you want to do it all at once you have to edit the custom dictionary file, which is shared by all Mac programs that use Spelling.

Where that file is depends on which version of MacOS you’re using[1]

Open Finder and then choose Go > Go to Folder from the menu, then copy in one of the two file paths below.

If you’re on an older version of MacOS, then paste in

~/Library/Spelling/

If you’re on Sequoia (or, I think, Sonoma), then paste in

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.AppleSpell/Library/Spelling

Press enter and you’ll be taken to the folder. Double click on the LocalDictionary file and it will open in TextEdit.

Now you can delete / add words in bulk. When you’ve finished, save the file and your new version of the custom dictionary should be available everywhere.

Just to be clear: later versions of macOS may well have LocalDictionary in both locations – helpful, I know! If the longer (~/Library/Group Containers…) location exists, then that is the one you want to use…

HTH


  1. New versions have a long complicated path, but it means that the custom dictionary should appear on all your devices…]. ↩︎

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