Adding Spellcheck Languages to MacOS

by: Tom Gewecke

Last modified: Nov 26, 2023 7:49 AM

5 13244 Last modified Nov 26, 2023 7:49 AM

As of Sonoma, MacOS provides spellchecking in 24 languages: English*, Irish, Arabic*, Spanish, Punjabi, French, German, Czech, Danish, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, Norwegian*, Polish, Portuguese*, Romanian, Finnish, Swedish, Vietnamese, Turkish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, Telugu, and Korean. (An asterisk indicates more than one variety of the language is supported.)

Spellcheck is governed by settings you make in System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input > Edit > Spelling. (For MacOS versions before Ventura, it is System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > Spelling.)

More languages can be added to MacOS by finding .dic and .aff files for them on the internet and installing them in Home/Library/Spelling. Examples of sites which have these are Bouzout, OpenOffice, and Wooorm.

To get to Home/Library, you hold down the Option key while doing Finder > Go. If what you download has the extension .oxt, you can get to the .dic and .aff files by changing .oxt to .zip, double clicking on it, and going into the folder that results.

Dictionaries added like this do not normally work with spelling set to "automatic": You have to set it to the specific language you want.

Note that MS Office has its own separate spellcheck system.