On a fresh install with the English language pack “helppack_en-GB” installed.
There is ‘NO’ ‘Thesaurus’, it’s greyed-out.
why is this?
What Fix?
There is no thesaurus for English (UK). That’s it. The only way is to tinker with a US thesaurus so that it works for English (UK).
I have thesaurus on mine by default, LO 6.7.0.2, Windows 10 20H2
I also just downloaded a development version which was installed in its own container completely separate from existing LO, and that too has the same thesaurus, MyThes Thesaurus, and works in English (UK), also for English (NZ).
Make sure your document is set to English (UK), if it is set to None then spellcheck won’t work, nor will thesaurus. Click in your text and click Tools > Language > For all text > English (UK). This should be a fix for documents imported from Google Docs which just call the language en or something similar and might not be spellchecked.
Click Tools > Options > Language settings > Writing aids and check that MyThes Thesaurus is ticked under Available Language Modules. While you are there, check …Language settings > Languages to make sure you have, under Default languages for documents, English (UK) with a green tick and ABC in tiny writing (spellcheck language).
The thesaurus might be a Windows-only thing; I can’t check on Linux because it isn’t booting at moment.
I can’t find the extension for UK spellcheck anymore, probably because it is integrated into LO. It was by Marco Pinto, I think. The NZ spellcheck extension is basically UK with added extras apparently; I don’t use it however. Cheers, Al
BTW “helppack_en-GB” is the Help files, not language files.
Is the thesaurus really English (UK)? The one installed with LO 7.1.2 on Windows 7 has an accompanying note as follows: “en_GB is using the WordNet thesaurus from the en_US directory”.
Well, it works in an English (UK) document, as well as English (NZ), no tinkering required. Searching on shade I get UK spelling (and US spelling) of colour (color) and spectre (specter). Its function as a thesaurus is to offer alternatives to words so it is not necessarily a drawback to have both forms of spelling because you are looking for meanings and they are the same for the vast majority of words.
Importantly, it is not greyed out. That would probably be a document language mismatch.
Anyway, I found the English Dictionary extension through Google, it is not found by the site search under spellcheck, dictionary or thesaurus but probably just under “English-Dictionary”.