Got a new Mac and got everything transferred over just fine - except for all the words I painstakingly saved over the last couple years as “learn spelling.”
Is there a local save file of these words I can transfer to the new computer?
Yes, check in your old user folder’s ~/Library/Spelling folder. There should be a file in there using the language code you write in, so for example, “en”, would be US English. I’ve noticed on newer systems that file is sometimes missing, and is instead called “LocalDictionary” (which may be localised to a different name). Whatever the case, it will not be a file ending in .dat (which you may see a few of), and if you try opening it in TextEdit you should find all of your words in it, one line at a time. You can either copy that file over to your new user folder, or copy and paste into the new version of that file, if you’ve already used it a bit.
You may need to restart any Mac software that uses the spell check engine in order for them to pick up the new words. Safest would just be to log out and log back in (I don’t think a full reboot is necessary).
Thank you!
Hi @AmberV, facing a similar situation I followed your suggestions (thanks!), but for my macOS Monterey 12.1 I couldn’t locate LocalDictionary, nor Spelling 
Couldn’t find in Library anything that may be related (well there’s TextReplacements.db and something called dynamic-lexicon.dat, but feels like I’m better off letting them be).
Also tried full-text search for some terms unique to my story, but they only show up in Scrivener-related files.
Guess Apple changed the way this works…
Thanks!
It didn’t change it by much. I went to ~/Library and searched for spell and soon found this:
and this:
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you’re right, I see it now, thanks! 