Friday, June 3, 2011

Extra Spell Checking Dictionaries for OS X 10.6

Apple provides only a limited selection of spell checkers for OS X. But you can also add dictionaries used by OpenOffice. You just put the .dic and .aff files in Home/Library/Spelling.  Sources for these:

1) http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries

2) http://extensions.services.openoffice.org:80/en/dictionaries

3) https://github.com/SublimeText/Dictionaries

4) https://dictionaries.io

What you download from the second source will have the extension .oxt. You need to change this to .zip, then double click on the file. The resulting folder should contain the .dic and .aff files.

Oddly those sites have nothing for Turkish.  For that try this one:

http://code.google.com/p/tr-spell/downloads/list

For Greek, go here.

For Finnish, go  here.

For Catalan, go here.

For Slovak, go here.

For info on making dictionaries, see >this page

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi. i am using a serbian openoffice dictionary. unfortunately, it only works if i select it in the spellchcek menu -- it doesn't seem to be picked up by the multilingual setting. this is still happening in 10.7. i was wondering if aynbody could confirm this was happening with other languages as well -- or maybe suggest a way to fix this.
all best,
aleks

Tom Gewecke said...

To get help with something like this, you need to go to the Apple forums:

https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.7_lion

Alex said...

Have you tried the following?

From the System Preferences > Language & Text > Text: Spelling: "Automatic by Language" and then re-open the list, go down to SET UP and SELECT your language, then drag it up on top (or #2) for the list?

I had the same problem you mentioned and this worked for me. I know type in both English and Greek and the spelling is checked in both languages.

Ross said...

That works perfectly for spell checking, but unfortunately misspelt words don't have any suggestions for the correct spelling. This means the auto-correct feature doesn't work. The strange thing is that this works perfectly in iOS, so it's weird it's not simple to get working on OS X 10.7.

Tom Gewecke said...

Ross -- did you jailbreak iOS to add a dictionary and found that autocorrect works OK?

Ross said...

No jailbreak necessary. It just works in iOS for Greek - even gets the accents right.

Tom Gewecke said...

The spellcheck/autocorrect in iOS indeed covers a much larger range of languages than that in OS X, and I perhaps that indicates that it's not in fact so simple to bring OS X up to the same level. Lion did not add a single new spellcheck language, which I found quite surprising considering what iOS can do.

Neophytos said...

hi,

managed to get greek working however english is not. any ideas.

thanks

Tom Gewecke said...

Neophytos -- Sorry, no, but why would you add English, OS X comes with that already.

John said...

Hi everybody. Isquare, has released a free Greek language download that works very nicely with OSX 10.6.8 and above.
You can find it here:
http://downloads.isquare.gr/

Halil Özgür said...

Note for the future visitors: you may be able to get a more up-to-date dictionary (though that would depend on the authors) by utilizing/lifting Firefox spell checking dictionaries.

1. Download the spell checker for your language from Firefox add-ons (e.g. Turkish)
2. Rename the .xpi file to .zip and extract.
3. Move the .aff and .dic files to ~/Library/Spelling.
4. (Optional) System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > Spell Checking > Automatic (This was problematic for me though, it looks like some (most of the?) times only the English part works).