

So, in the case of Latin species names, I had to put each part of the name on a separate line - this is why I had to sort the list and look for and delete duplicates (there are more than 700 species of eucalyptus, for example). You cannot have two words on one line (that includes compound words with a hyphen).

The main thing to remember is that each word MUST go on its own line. However, I started by creating a new (blank) custom dictionary in Word because I wanted to sort them and run a macro to check for duplicates. And make sure you specific the Encoding as Unicode, not the default ANSI.īecause *.dic files are just text files, you can also use a text editor to create a new dictionary file. Just make sure you save the file with the *.dic file extension, not *.txt. Once you’ve opened a *.dic file in a text editor, you can add, edit, or delete entries. Notepad I use EditPlus because it has a ‘sort’ option, but Notepad works fine).

This means you can open them in a text editor (e.g. Now, *.dic files are just text files with a different file extension. (Note: Follow these instructions if you can’t see the AppData folder.) By default, the Office dictionary files (Office 2010 to 365, at least) are stored in C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof and have a *.dic file extension. I use Word for Windows, so this information is for Windows. The first thing was to find out where the dictionary files are stored. I wanted a special dictionary file that I could copy and use on other computers, and turn off if I no longer needed it, so I didn’t want these words added to my default dictionary. I had 4000+ Latin and common species names I’d gathered from public lists that I wanted to add to a unique dictionary so that Word didn’t flag them as spelling errors, except if they really were spelling errors or if they were species I hadn’t included in my species dictionary. I had such a situation a few months ago, but neglected to write up what I did. But what if you have thousands? Doing it one word at a time using the usual methods is painfully slow and not ergonomically sound. But most assume you only have a few words to add to that dictionary. There are plenty of websites that tell you how to create a custom dictionary in Microsoft Word.
