How to “remove” a word from Word's main Spelling Dictionary

Or how to get a word that Word thinks is correctly spelt to show up as a spelling error

Article contributed by Suzanne Barnhill and Dave Rado

To make Word question the spelling of a word that is “correctly” spelled according to its dictionary, you need to create an “exclusion” dictionary. An exclusion dictionary causes Word's spelling engine to ignore the entries in the main dictionary for the words it contains.

This technique can be a very helpful adjunct to AutoCorrect. For example, I frequently mistype “about” as “abut.” I could get AutoCorrect to change “abut” to “about,” but this might happen without my noticing it sometimes, when “abut” was what I really meant. I don't use “abut” anywhere near as often as “about,” though, so I don't mind having it marked as misspelled when it isn't, if it saves me from missing a misspelled “about.” I recently also added “pubic” to my exclusion dictionary when I realized that on my business brochure I'd cited the Fairhope Pubic Library as one of my references!

Creating exclusion dictionaries is described in the Word Help topic "Specify a preferred spelling for a word". Unfortunately, the Help files and articles on the subject are misleading and in places, inaccurate.

Create your exclusion dictionary as a text file – either using Notepad, or by creating a new document in Word and, in the Save As dialog, setting the “Files of type” to “Text Only (*.txt).” when you save it.
In your text file, type in the word(s) you want Word to treat as misspelled, one word per paragraph. In other words, you type in the "bad" spellings here. This forces Word to ignore that entry in the dictionary.
Do NOT use any capital letters. Type all of your words entirely in lower-case. If you do not, they won't match the main dictionary entries so they won't work.

Your next challenge is to find out what to use as the file name for your dictionary. If you are working in American, the Help topic tells you. For the rest of us, we need to find the main dictionary file. In the case of Office 2000 and above it will be called Mssp3*.lex, where * represents your language. In Office 97, the file is Mssp2_*.lex.

First look in the following path:

<systemdrive>:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Proof

Systemdrive stands for the name of the drive in which Windows is installed.

Pray that you see a file named MSSP3EN.LEX in there. If you do, you've found the main English dictionary.
If you do not see that file, use File Explorer's Search to search your Program Files folder for MSSP*.LEX. Make sure you click More advanced options and specify that the search is to look in Hidden folders and System folders, or you will not find anything.
If you work in American, Canadian, or UK English, your main dictionary is named MSSP3EN.LEX, so your exclusion dictionary must be named MSSP3EN.EXC.

If you work in other languages, the names are:

Language	Dictionary	Exclusion Dictionary
Office 2000 and above
Australian	MSSP3ENA.LEX	MSSP3ENA.EXC
Spanish	MSSP3ES.LEX	MSSP3ES.EXC
French	MSSP3FR.LEX	MSSP3FR.EXC
Office 97
Australian	MSSP2_ENA.LEX	MSSP2_ENA.EXC
Spanish	MSSP2_ES.LEX	MSSP2_ES.EXC
French	MSSP2_FR.LEX	MSSP2_FR.EXC

In Office 97, you save the file in the Proof folder where the main dictionary resides.

In Office 2000 and above, you must save the exclusion dictionary in the Proof folder where your custom dictionary is stored. This should be:

<homedrive>:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Proof

Where <homedrive> is usually "C:" drive.

Unfortunately, it sometimes isn't. So you may need to force Word to tell you where it is. In Word 2003, do the following:

Go to Tools>Spelling and Grammar>Options>Custom Dictionaries
At the bottom of that dialog, the path to your custom dictionary is shown. Regrettably, the dialog is not usually large enough to read the full path.
Click the New button on the right. You will see the following dialog:

Click the little downward arrow to the right of the Look in: field at the top. It will drop down the full hierarchy as shown. As you can see, this Custom Dictionary is in the default location on the C drive.

Follow the instructions in the Help topic and save your Exclusion Dictionary in this location.