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.

Dictionary	Last changed	Size	Download
Afrikaans	26/10/1998	511 KB	DIC	TXT
Belarusian *	16/06/2006	2436 KB	DIC	TXT
Bulgarian *	22/10/2007	411 KB	DIC	TXT
Catalan	20/01/2002	818 KB	DIC	TXT
Croatian	20/01/2002	113 KB	DIC	TXT
Czech	07/11/2002	1108 KB	DIC	TXT
Danish	26/10/1998	1125 KB	DIC	TXT
Dutch	20/08/2002	870 KB	DIC	TXT
English (UK+US)	03/03/2000	568 KB	DIC	TXT
English (UK)	30/06/1998	538 KB	DIC	TXT
English (US)	30/06/1998	421 KB	DIC	TXT
French	22/06/2002	421 KB	DIC	TXT
German (new sp)	06/01/2005	2038 KB	DIC	TXT
German (old+new sp)	10/05/1999	1135 KB	DIC	TXT
German (CH, old+new sp)	21/07/2000	1127 KB	DIC	TXT
Greek	12/06/2003	414 KB	DIC	TXT
Hungarian *	03/12/2003	1171 KB	DIC	TXT
Italian	30/06/1998	779 KB	DIC	TXT
Latin	15/11/2005	3090 KB	DIC	TXT
Mongolian *	23/03/2008	5905 KB	DIC	TXT
Polish (huge)	10/06/2005	8645 KB	DIC	TXT
Polish (large)	15/01/1999	1389 KB	DIC	TXT
Polish (small) *	24/05/1999	491 KB	DIC	TXT
Polish (additional) *	16/01/2001	164 KB	DIC	-
Portuguese	21/07/2000	1042 KB	DIC	TXT
Portuguese (BR)	27/04/2000	715 KB	DIC	TXT
Romanian	15/10/2005	121 KB	DIC	TXT
Russian (large)	26/09/1999	1633 KB	DIC	TXT
Russian (small) *	24/05/1999	517 KB	DIC	TXT
Slovak	20/01/2002	121 KB	DIC	TXT
Slovenian	24/02/1999	533 KB	DIC	TXT
Spanish	30/06/1998	683 KB	DIC	TXT
Swedish	05/10/1998	392 KB	DIC	TXT
Ukrainian	17/04/2001	852 KB	DIC	TXT

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.