Replacing Spelling Dictionaries

Note: these instructions apply only to Scrivener for Windows 3.0.0+ and Scapple for Windows 1.4+.

Scrivener and Scapple for Windows use open-source dictionaries from Hunspell for their spellcheck functionality. If you would like to replace these with your preferred dictionaries, you will want to rename your dictionary files to match the existing ones for the target language, then place them in the same location as the originals.

In the following example, we’ll replace the US English dictionary used by Scrivener with one that we’ll download from LibreOffice (but note that you can download Hunspell dictionary files from other sources, too.)

1. Individual language files can be downloaded from this LibreOffice GitHub repository. Language folders will be listed by their ISO language code. To download US English, locate the folder for “en” and click on it.

2. In the subfolder, click on the “en_US.aff” file.

3. In the top right corner of the code viewer, click the ‘Download raw file’ button, as shown below.

   

   Save the file to your computer, then click your browser’s back button to return to the "en" subfolder. Locate the “en_US.dic” file and repeat this process to download it.

4. Copy the .aff and .dic files you just downloaded, then navigate inside Scrivener’s installation folder at C:\Program Files\Scrivener3\ (or C:\Program Files\Scapple\) and locate the \hunspell\dict subfolder.

5. Each installed language will have its own folder within the "dict" folder. For example, the US English files will be in the folder titled “English-en-us”. Inside, you’ll find several files: an .aff file, a .dic file and a readme text file. You’ll now want to remove the original “en-US.aff” and “en-US.dic” files from the folder (note: instead of overwriting the original dictionary files, we recommend moving them to another directory first for safekeeping).

   If you are not seeing a folder for your desired language, this means you have not yet downloaded the language files within Scrivener. To do this, navigate to File > Options… > Corrections, click the “Spelling” tab, click the “Download…” button, then select your language from the list and click “Download”. You should then see the language folder appear in the "dict" folder after refreshing File Explorer.

6. Paste in the new .aff and .dic files you downloaded in step 3, then rename the files to match the original “en-US” file names (i.e., “en_US.aff” and “en_US.dic” should be renamed “en-US.aff” and “en-US.dic”). Scrivener will only recognize these files if they assume the same filenames as the originals, so this step is key.

7. Restart Scrivener for your changes to take effect.

Note for users running Scrivener 3.1.4.1 or older

As of version 3.1.5., Scrivener can only be run on 64-bit systems. If you have a 32-bit system and are therefore running a pre-3.1.5 version of Scrivener, please note that you will not be able to download dictionaries from within Scrivener. With the 3.1.5 upgrade, the dictionaries moved location on the server, so older versions point to a file that's not accessible and will download ~1KB .dic and .aff files containing an error code.

In this case, once you have downloaded the language from within Scrivener—thus creating the directory for the language in the program’s installation folder—you will want to follow the above instructions to replace Scrivener’s dictionary files with valid ones (the LibreOffice Github repository used in our example is a good source for this).

Adding words to your personal dictionary

It is also possible to add words to your personal dictionary, which will prevent them being flagged as misspellings and also then add them to the list of suggested words.

In both Scrivener and Scapple, flagged words can be added by right-clicking on the word and choosing "Learn Spelling" from the context menu. Words can also be added by editing the custom word list. To do this in Scrivener, navigate to File ▸ Options ▸ Corrections, click the "Spelling" tab, then choose "View Personal Word List". In Scapple, go to Edit ▸ Spelling ▸ Dictionaries and click "Personal Words...".