Clearing Accidentally "Learned" Words from macOS Dictionary

Does this little moment strike fear into your heart?

Argahghg! Fat fingers! I meant to FIX the spelling, not learn this misspelled word!

Now forevermore, the spell checker won’t catch that misspelled word. Fear not, you can fix it.

When this happened to me recently, fortunately, Dave Bolger told me how to fix it.

@chriscoyier If you are on OS X you can easily delete those ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary edit in text editor, log back in to reload.

— Dave Bolger (@davebolger) November 4, 2016

I just popped open that file from the command line quick with:

$ sublime ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary

This is what I found at the time:

Ugghkh. Look how many dumb ones I have.https://t.co/phMPlYEJpq pic.twitter.com/Bt9rWiISuh

— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) November 4, 2016

Another great one!

@davebolger @chriscoyier Good to know. Thanks. All good here, though. pic.twitter.com/ponFmalJEK

— (((terrified))) (@sailcode) November 4, 2016

If it’s not obvious, delete the words from that file you don’t want the spell checker to think are spelled correctly anymore, save the file, and you’ll be all set.

If you do it, did you find any weird ones in yours?

Comments

Dan Bohea

# January 13, 2017

I wrote an Ansible role to help manage the macOS LocalDictionary file if you’re interested.

https://github.com/danbohea/ansible-role-spelling

It’s part of a broader macOS management project I’m working on called Macsible:

https://github.com/macsible/macsible

M. Zapata

# January 13, 2017

Is there a similar process that can be done for iOS when using an iPhone?

Bradley Staples

# January 13, 2017

Mine weren’t too bad: successully & skitch.

Pete

Permalink to comment# January 16, 2017

Weird, mine is just a single word: skitch

Luke

# January 15, 2017

Someone please write an app that will read your added words and attempt to find an obvious match on the internet (Laravel for example) and if not, extrapolate a (hopefully pun-like) meaning from similar words.

Example:
Attributse: noun
1. a quality or feature regarded as a characteristic or inherent part of filipino rice balls.
derived from attribute and butse

nickb

# January 17, 2017

Thanks for this! I had no idea this could have been a problem or how to fix it.
Thankfully I only had two spurious entries – the popular ‘Skitch’ and ‘Burnand’.

By the way, I don’t have sublime on my computer, so I used vi instead:

vi ~/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary

Rouzbeh Sarrafieh

# January 17, 2017

Am I the only person to change sublime or subl to slime???

Great post by the way!

Long time reader, first time commenting

Rob L.

Permalink to comment# January 18, 2017
Another happy subl here!

I was stunned my list was so short (I thought I really used this feature) and included no accidental entries, these were all pretty intentional:
```
bajillion
cromulent
permalinks
Pinterest
smoosh
subnav
```

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