How to add or remove words to Mac's built-in dictionary

The truth is that seeing words underlined in our texts in red because the application we use to write or the system does not recognize these words is quite frustrating. What's more, on many occasions it makes you doubt whether you are really using the correct words or not. Nevertheless, there are several ways to add more words to the built-in dictionary that macOS has. And we are going to tell you how to increase or remove words.

To add or remove words from Apple's built-in dictionary we will have two possibilities. One of them is to add words from the application that we are using at that moment. What's more, if you do it from a browser it will be the same. On the other hand, and as a second option, is to go directly from the file that is created in our library.

Adding words from an application or from the browser itself

As we have said, it is logical that on many occasions it is difficult for us to remember which words we want to appear in our particular dictionary on our Mac. In addition, we will also not be sure if the system needs you to add this word or not; you should always wait for the underlined in red.

When this happens you should place the mouse pointer on the word marked in red and click with the right mouse button. In the menu that seems to us, we can find options such as "Learn a word" —this is in TextEdit, for example— or "Add to dictionary" —this in the case of Google Chrome. Done, the red underline will disappear instantly.

Add or remove words from the file where all the words are stored

It is possible that the best you can do is go to the file that is created with all the words you want to add to the built-in macOS dictionary. Either to manually add more words or to delete because you added a word that you thought was correct and finally it was not.

Well, whatever the case, you should open the «Finder» and in the menu bar go to the «Go» option. When the options are displayed, you will see that at the end you will have the option to "Go to the folder ...". Mark it and write:

~ / Library / Spelling

You will see that you will have a folder in which you will be shown a file named "LocalDictionary". Open it with TextEdit and you will see that all the words that you have been adding appear in that list. Add new ones or delete the ones you see fit. That easy.