More of this Feature • Adding and Deleting Custom Dictionary Entries

Related Resources • Word Tutorials

While Microsoft includes an extensive dictionary with Word, you will still encounter words that are not included in it. For many people, this can become an annoyance when they’re working on a document with the spelling feature enabled – words that are correct but not included in Word’s standard dictionary will appear as misspellings, underlined with a squiggly red line. Rather than disable Word’s spelling feature and lose all the spelling tools for the sake of circumnavigating this annoyance, it might make sense to create a custom dictionary of frequently used words.

You can purchase third party dictionaries of specialized terminology – legal and medical dictionaries are particularly popular – if you don’t want to spend the time adding a lot of terms up front. However, most people will find that one they create themselves will do just fine.

1. Select Options from the Tools menu



2. Click the Spelling & Grammar tab



3. Under Spelling, click Custom Dictionaries

4. Click New



5. In the Create Custom Dictionary dialog box, type a name for your dictionary



6. Click Save

By default, the dictionary will be available when you are checking your document’s spelling in all languages.



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