Are there any patches for MS Word?

[M. Scott]

I'm working on MS Word 2007 and the limited dictionary is driving me nuts. Is there any patch to make it learn a few more words?

These are all said to be wrong on my first page alone, and are in the dictionary: Shallowing, fella, twenty-something, and emotionlessness.

Yes, I know I can add them manually, but it's a pain.

[alleycat]

The short answer is yes.

There are some expanded dictionaries out there (medical terms, languages, scientific, etc.), and you can add them to Word as a "custom dictionary" (along with the default dictionary, not as a replacement). You could probably find something with a Google search. Some of these are free and some of them are sold (such as legal dictionaries). I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember someone selling a Word version (which would be a .dic file) of the American Heritage Dictionary.

I can't tell you any more since I've never done this myself.

[M. Scott]

Hmmm. I've been playing with it. It's not the easiest adjustment to make, and some of the custom ones I've found have complaints of errors in them. Don't need more of those :) If I find that American Heritage one, and it's free/cheap, I'll post the link.

[tmesis]

You can download the Unix dictionary from here: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/share/dict/web2 - it's just a text file. You could include it into your regular custom dictionary by highlighting and copying the lot and pasting it into custom.dic.

(To find custom.dic, go to your custom dictionary in MS Word and find the file path - it'll be something like C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof . Paste the file path into Windows Explorer & you should see custom.dic there. You can open this & edit it in notepad like a regular text file.)