Add or Remove Words in Spell Checking Dictionary in Windows 10

Windows 10 comes with a spell checking feature. It is targeted mostly for tablet users, as it supports auto correct or highlighting of misspelled words only in Modern apps and Internet Explorer/Edge. Using the simple instructions from this article, you will be able to extend the dictionary of the built-in spell checker of Windows 10 with custom words. You can also quickly remove words from the dictionary. Two methods are explained.

When the option "highlight misspelled words" is enabled, any misspelled words that you have typed (and words which cannot be found in the dictionary) will be underlined with a red wavy line. From the right-click menu, you can access available options for a word. For example, you can add it to the dictionary, so Windows will recognize this word and won't highlight it any more.

Windows 10 allows managing the dictionary. So, if you have accidentally added a misspelled word to the dictionary, you can remove it from there.

Dictionary files

For each language, Windows 10 stores a number of files related to the dictionary. They can be found under the folder %AppData%\Microsoft\Spelling. You can type this address to Explorer's location bar to open it directly.

Here are the files for the English language:

The file default.dic stores the words you manually added to the dictionary.

Words stored in the default.exc will be excluded from spell-checking.

Finally, the default.acl file stores words for the AutoCorrect word list.

Let's see how to edit the dictionary.

Add a word to the dictionary in Windows 10

1. Right click on a highlighted word that is underlined.
2. Select Add to dictionary in the context menu.
3. The word will be added to the "default.dic" file.

Remove a word from the dictionary

1. Open File Explorer.
2. Go to the folder C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Spelling\your language, for example, C:\Users\winaero\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Spelling\en-US.
3. Open the default.dic file with Notepad and remove any unwanted words.

How to view and clear the dictionary contents

Besides the mentioned text files, Windows 10 allows viewing the contents of the user dictionary in the Settings app. Here is how.

1. Open Settings.
2. Go to Privacy - Speech, Inking & Typing.
3. On the right, click on the View user dictionary link.
4. There, you can see the dictionary contents. A special button above will allow removing all the added words with one click.
5. Alternatively, you can open dictionary files with Notepad and remove all words manually.

That's it.

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