WinEdt uses dictionaries to highlight misspelled words as they are being typed (optional) as well as for compilation of possible word completion(s) and the list of suggestions for misspelled words. WinEdt's Dictionary manager allows users to configure WinEdt for more than one dictionary. Environments that should not be subject to spell checking can be excluded...

You should read the Help in WinEdt's Dictionary Manager Dialog for more information on installing additional dictionaries and setting the numerous available options for your needs.

Dictionaries

The table below lists all available dictionaries (word lists), linking to the /systems/win32/winedt/dict directory on CTAN. Prior to downloading, you may select a CTAN server, preferably the one nearest to you.

The sizes of dictionaries below refer to the zipped DIC archive. The actual size of the word lists is approximately three or four times larger. Each dictionary is accompanied by a short text (TXT) file describing the relevant information pertaining to that dictionary's creation and installation instructions. You should read this file before downloading and installing the associated dictionary.

Dictionaries marked by (*) are currently not uploaded to CTAN and are available only from WinEdt's server.

The English (UK+US) dictionary consists of more .dic files to allow for different spelling conventions. The older simpler dictionaries English (UK), and English (US); are available for those users who prefer a straightforward setup and don't want to make any choices...

The French dictionary is available in two versions: a (new) one, which uses the ligatures "œ" [oe] and "æ" [ae] etc. as one character, and the (old) one, which uses multiple characters for them. Further documentation on how to configure WinEdt to facilitate inputting these ligatures is available in French.

While the German (old+new sp) dictionary and its Swiss variant German (CH, old+new sp) contain two word lists for the new and the old spelling respectively, the much larger German (new sp) dictionary only contains words according to the new German spelling rules.

Some word lists are rather large and on a slow or low-resource computer they may affect the performance of WinEdt. Therefore, some alternative (smaller) word lists are also provided (in Russian and Polish).

External spell checkers

Since WinEdt can interface to any application, it is also possible to use an external spell checker with WinEdt.

4spell

In particular, 4Spell (a successor of amSpell) can be integrated with WinEdt very well. 4Spell uses WinEdt's dictionary lookup functions and consequently its word-lists (dictionaries) have the same format as those of WinEdt. 4Spell is particularly suitable for the final corrections since it allows you to carefully check all the modifications and ignored text (highlighted in different colors) before saving the changes. To install 4Spell with WinEdt define its executable as a Utility in WinEdt's (Tools) menu and pass "%f" (the current document) as a parameter to 4Spell. For example:

   C:\Program Files\WinEdt\Dict\4Spell\4spell.exe "%f"

4Spell accepts a few parameters that can be handy:

    -sl=<lang>
      where <lang>=us,nl,de,fr,ru,sk,sz,pl:
      the language that 4Spell speaks in its menus
    -l=<lang>
      where <lang>=us,nl,etc.: the dictionary name
      (without .dic)
    -R
      start spell-checking at once

So, if you are, say, German, spell-checking a Polish file, you could start 4Spell like this:

    4spell -l=pl -sl=de yourfile.tex

After 4Spell is finished with spell checking and the changes have been saved on your hard drive, WinEdt detects that the file has been modified and prompts you to update the changes in its document window.

To download 4Spell and any additionally available word-lists please visit:

• 4TeX's Home Page

Hspell

Hspell is a free Hebrew spell checker. In addition, the project has also produced a Hebrew morphological analyzer, which for every valid Hebrew word lists all of its possible readings (valid combinations of prefix and inflected base word).

The project's site is at www.ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker, where it can also be downloaded. Hspell requires a cygwin system.

Contributions

New contributions are welcome! If you've compiled a word list that is currently not available and you would like to share it with others, you can upload it to ftp://ftp.winedt.org/incoming/ and let me know: webmaster@winedt.org.

Corrections or additions for existing dictionaries should be directed to the respective maintainer.

Last revised on: 29.04.2006    |    Comments and suggestions to webmaster@winedt.org