Tardis:Spell checking with a Mac

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T:MAC SPELL

It's easy to set up your Mac to spell check in British English. This is important to do while editing this site, because British English is required.

OS version information

The following tutorial applies to OS X Lion (10.7), but the fundamentals have been present in the OS X structure for a while. Some very slight modification of this tutorial will help you spell check in British English regardless of your OS X flavour.

What this tutorial covers

This is a tutorial about how to quickly change your global, OS-level spelling settings. There are ways to change spell checking within individual, non-Apple programs such as Firefox and Microsoft Word, but this tutorial will not cover such methods.

What is offered here is a way to make one simple setting change that affects most everything on your computer. Note that if you have taken steps to alter spell checking within individual programs, this tutorial may produce unexpected results, or have no effect at all, within those individual programs.

It is strongly recommended that you do not attempt to make changes at the program level. Your life will be much simpler if you stick with altering the OS X settings, instead.

Changing your dictionary

All OS X installations carry with them a vast array of dictionary applications. Changing from your default local English dictionary to the Oxford English Dictionary is a snap.

Note that the British English dictionary in Mac OS X is not the "official" dictionary of this wiki. The OS X British dictionary will, for example, tell you that colonise and dematerialise are valid alternates for what appears to be the primary spellings of colonize and dematerialize. Because Mac British spell checking flags colonize as incorrect, however, this wiki deems colonise to be the "practically correct" spelling. For more of these "close calls", please see our spelling cheat card. The technically minded may wish to seek out the full list of words whose spelling we enforce.

1. Go to your Applications folder
2. Open the app named "Dictionary"
3. Type ⌘ , to open up Preferences
4. Scan through the list of resources and put them in the order you want. To turn on the British Dictionary and Thesaurus to the exclusion of your defaults, pull the British resources to the top of the list, select them, then deselect your defaults. Now, when you open up Dictionary and search for a word, you'll get the British spelling. Helpfully, if you enter an American spelling, it'll still find the word, but simply tell you that you've used an American spelling.