Hi. I’m transitioning from Microsoft word and the biggest problem I’m facing is that the dictionary is severely limited. It red underlines words like “financials” and “influencer”. My documents (originally created in Word) are filled with red underlines.
I downloaded a dictionary from here and restarted the program but these words are still underlined. Am I doing something wrong?
Is your text correctly “language-tagged”? Go to Tool>Options, Languages & Locales>General to see which default language is configured for your text.
These words aren’t underlined for my installation with English (UK) but they are if I select everything and choose English (USA) as the language. I guess that the US dictionary might not be as up-to-date as the UK one.
DictionarySpellCheck.odt (34.8 KB)
People volunteer to update dictionaries and maybe there are fewer people in US interested in maintaining LibreOffice.
You could report an enhancement bug, How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Wiki
Or maybe volunteer yourself, Get Involved | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft
My default language is English US. Changing it to English UK fixed the problem. Much thanks.
This is however applied to a single document only. Is there a way to use English UK for all documents without changing the system language? I’m using Windows 11 if that makes a difference.
You should use the language of your country that people expect you would use.
Just right click each underlined word if it is correctly spelt and select Add to dictionary. It might take a few minutes but they won’t be flagged again.
English UK and English US doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me. Is there a way to change it for all documents?
The words you add to the user dictionary are added for all languages, so if you right click on the word “influencer” and select Add to dictionary then not only will English (USA) allow the word for future documents but also English (Philippines) and English (Jamaica). I think after you have added twenty or so words to the user dictionary, your sea of red will look a lot more friendly.
Words you add to this dictionary can be removed if you make a mistake. Click Tools > Spelling to open the manual spell checker. Click the button Options to open the list of dictionaries. Select standard [All] then click the Edit button, select the incorrect entry and click the delete button.
IMHO you can’t change this easily for existing documents (without using macros).
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But you can edit and update your default template to your needs. And you may use more than one template, even if there is only one “default”.
If you don’t want to change the languages in Tools>Options, Languages & Locales>General, I am afraid you can’t unless your documents are based on a custom template.
The default “factory template” is not mentioned if the document metadata (same omission when you double-click on a template document to create a new one; template association is kept only with File>Open>Templates). Therefore, changing paragraph style Default Paragraph Style in the template will have no effect on existing documents.
If our reluctance to change “system language” is a fear to alter the UI, note that you can configure separately the UI (e.g. keep en_US), the locale (date, currency, …) and document language (e.g. switch to en_UK).
I have not experimented to see the effect on existing documents. I’d bet it won’t change the language. But take the opportunity of an edit to change the language in Default Paragraph Style Font tab to switch to a new one. Default Paragraph Style is a “technical” style whose attributes are shared by all other styles. Thus any change cascades down (unless it is overridden in a particular style).
What happens is that US, CA and AU are maintained by Kevin Atkinson who makes very little releases.
GB and ZA are maintained by me now-a-days and in 2025 ZA will start being more maintained than before.
In that case use Jörg’s US fork. Asking the user to change the document language from USA to UK is counter productive.
I looked at Jörg’s fork and in his latest version he wrote that he reverted to the normal size wordlist (the same I am using) because someone else grabbed the large wordlist.
So, it all depends on Kevin Atkinson:
I don’t know what is the point of Kevin maintaining dictionaries if he doesn’t make regular updates, and that is why I suggested him to move the task to other people.
Kevin’s latest release is from 2020 I believe, and I had already to make fixes myself in the LibreOffice version, but I can’t maintain all the English variants myself.
I can only maintain South Africa and British.
could you elaborate a bit ?
workload ? complexity ?
English is not my first language, so please forgive me if I am mistaken. I would like to suggest copying all terms from the UK wordlist to the US wordlist until a maintainer can be found to take full responsibility for the US wordlist. A separate wordlist can be maintained on github to take care of differences. For e.g.
UK > US
colour > color
centre > center
organise > organize
defence > defense
analyse > analyze
practise > practice
A python (awk or maybe perl) script can make these changes to .dic and affix files once they are copied from UK data.
Workload and complexity.
I would have to check which words are US only and the .AFF file used by US which decodes derivates is different from the British one since I have done tons of fixes and improvements in GB.
@shantanuo 's idea is good, but we face the challenges I wrote in the previous paragraph.
