In the internet age, language evolves faster than your computer’s dictionary. Even if you only speak English, new words such as “rizz,” “girlboss,” and “microtransaction” keep popping up. No matter how versed you are in slang, these words can definitely still mess up your typing experience on your Mac.
Credit: Pranay Parab
Even if you disable autocorrect, you’ll still have to put up with little red lines underneath words your Mac doesn’t recognize. But you can get around this by adding words you use regularly to your Mac’s dictionary. This will keep your computer from bothering you when you’re feeling extra skibidi.
How to add words to the Mac’s dictionary
The next time your Mac tries to autocorrect or underline a word you want to keep as-is, select the offending word, right-click it, and choose Learn Spelling. This will add the word to your Mac’s dictionary. This option will only appear when you select a word that’s not in your computer’s dictionary. Once you ask the Mac to learn a spelling, it will stop bothering you about that word. Note that this option may not always appear in all apps, but if you paste the text into any writing app, it’ll appear for sure.
This feature has been in macOS over a decade, but a Mastodon post by John Gruber recently highlighted another method for adding words to your Mac’s dictionary. To do this, open Finder and press Command-Shift-G. Now paste ~/Library/GroupContainers/group.com.apple.AppleSpell/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary in the form and hit Return. This will take you to the dictionary folder.
If you’ve already added words to your dictionary using the Learn Spelling option, they will appear in a file in this folder. That file is called en if your Mac’s default language is English, but it may use a different file name for other languages. Open this file and add one word per line to quickly create your own dictionary. Don’t forget to save the file before closing it. Manually adding words is a bit buggy and it doesn’t always help your Mac learn the right spellings, which is why I recommend using the Learn Spelling option for best results.
This is a great tip for everyone, but especially for multilingual people who use their Mac to send messages in different languages. In many countries where English isn’t the first language, it’s quite common to send bilingual messages that have a few words from English and a few from a different language. If that’s you, then you can use this feature to add common words from your language to your Mac’s dictionary and stop getting bothered about them.
