Batch Add Words to MS Spell-check Dic?

October 24, 2010 1:11 AM

I have a list of about 10,000 medical and chemical terms in an Excel file, many of which are not in the MS spell-check dictionary. How can I add all 10,000 at once? I've searched high and low on the Internet, and can't find any discussion of how to batch add a bunch of words to a MS Word dictionary. Anyone have a clue? Thanks!
posted by zachawry to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

have you tired adding a medical and chemical dictionary add-on?

But for your main question, not sure which OS you're using... but try something like this
posted by KogeLiz at 1:49 AM on October 24, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks for the help. It should theoretically work that way, it appears, but it tells me that I need the .dic file to be Unicode for it to be accepted. I've tried saving the file as Unicode in several different programs, but MS Word seems to be confused by all of them. Unable to read simple A-Z. Pathetic.
posted by zachawry at 3:33 AM on October 24, 2010

Response by poster: OK, I finally got it to accept a file as a custom dictionary, but it appears to recognize certain words from the list and not others.

Par for the course for MS products!
posted by zachawry at 4:07 AM on October 24, 2010

Response by poster: OK, I figured it out. A word has to be by itself on a line to be recognized. So, for instance "bacteraemia" will get red-lined if the entry in the .dic file is

"yersinia bacteraemia"

I guess that means all I have to do is go in and replace every space with a line break.
posted by zachawry at 4:30 AM on October 24, 2010

You didn't specify which version of Word you are using, but I vaguely recall that at least some versions will truncate the .dic file if you try to make it too big--there is a limit of 60kb file size (or 60k entries or something like that) and if you try to exceed that the excess simply gets lost. Don't know if it will happen to you, but be warned. Try searching the MS Word expert forums--I don't have the resources at hand, but I'm sure it's in there.
posted by Logophiliac at 8:54 AM on October 24, 2010