The spell check feature compares the words within your documents with the words within the main Office dictionary. This dictionary contains most of common words but it may not contain some proper names, technical terms, acronyms and capitalizations. To combat this issue, you can add words and capitalizations to a custom dictionary to prevent the spell check feature from flagging them as misspelled. The custom dictionary applies to Office 2016 – Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint, however the steps may differ slightly. Below are the step by step instructions for editing a Custom Dictionary in Word.
Editing a Custom Dictionary in Word
- Click the File tab to access the Backstage.
- Click Options from the left column.
- The Word Options dialog box will open. Select the Proofing option in the left column.
- From the Proofing options, verify the Suggest from main dictionary only is not checked.
- Click Custom Dictionaries…
- This will open the Custom Dictionaries dialog box. Select the dictionary you wish to edit and click Edit Word List. For this example, I am using the RoamingCustom.dic.
- This will open the selected dictionary’s dialog box. At this point, you can Add or Delete words.
- To Add a word to the custom dictionary, type the word within the Word(s): field and click Add.
- To Delete a word from the custom dictionary, navigate to the appropriate word and click Delete.
- To Edit a word in the custom dictionary, you must first delete it and then add it back with the proper spelling/capitalization.
- Once you have made the necessary changes to the dictionary, click OK to close the custom dictionary.dic dialog box.
- This will take you back to the Custom Dictionary dialog box. Click OK twice to close it and the Word Options dialog box.
- Your changes have now been added to the selected custom dictionary.