How can I edit my dictionary to replace US words to British words?

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Check-spelling-and-grammar-in-a-differe nt-language-b872cb8a-7568-4512-9c8e-1da7…

Word almost certainly has its own setting for dictionaries and languages that is different from the OS setting. Does the dictionary show UK spellings in TextEdit or Pages?

You can set the system dictionary with the following Terminal command:

defaults write -g NSPreferredSpellServerLanguage "en_GB"

and then restart.

Of course, it's worth pointing out that '-ise' as a "British" spelling is a new thing, only becoming commonplace in the early 1990s. The OED still uses -ize as the preferred spelling for most words. There's an episode of Inspector Morse where he reckons a suicide note is false because "No Oxford man would spell realize with an S. It's illiterate!" 😁

well, i don't know of a way to edit the dictionaries. I don't have Office installed. I do know if I switch System Preferences>Keyboard>Text Spelling to British English it does recognize the difference between se and ze in Apple programs. Can't speak to how Word functions.

There is no reason you should not be able to get the right behavior from Word 2016. Have you search/asked in its own forum?

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macword

Well, it's never too late to change how one spells. 🙂

For those who need, or just want, OED spellings, it may be worth knowing that dropping the appropriate hunspell dictionary files [1] in ~/Library/Spelling will make an OED dictionary available to the system spell checker.

[1] en_GB-oed.dic & en_GB-oed.aff from en_GB-oed.zip. From, for example, here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140228141833/http://en-gb.pyxidium.co.uk/dictionar y/OOo.php

mw9 wrote:

will make an OED dictionary available to the system spell checker.

That won't help the OP with Word though.

Maz K wrote:

Word where it doesn't recognise US spellings of words when I'm (supposed to be) using the English UK dictionary.

My Word 2016 does recognize US spellings except for the ize/ise issue. So I can see your problem if you want those....

Maz K wrote:

There's no point in setting up a custom dictionary because the words there would be IN ADDITION to the main dictionary being used.

What I really want to do is to edit the main dictionary and replace all the required -ZE words to -SE...

I think you may need an Exclusion Dictionary for this. Have a look at

http://www.krisgrint.com/using-exclusion-dictionaries-in-word-for-mac-2016/