Spell Check Dictionaries

Spell checking is provided by the Enchant library. Depending on your operating system, it may or may not load all installed spell check dictionaries automatically.

Linux and MacOS

On Linux and MacOS, you generally only have to install hunspell, aspell or myspell dictionaries on your system like you do for other applications. See your distro or OS documentation for how to do this. These dictionaries should show up as available spell check languages in novelWriter.

Windows

For Windows, English is included with the installation. For other languages you have to download and add dictionaries yourself.

Install Tool

A small tool to assist with this can be found under Tools > Add Dictionaries. It will import spell checking dictionaries from Free Office or Libre Office extensions. The dictionaries are then installed in the install location for the Enchant library and should thus work for any application that uses Enchant for spell checking.

Manual Install

If you prefer to do this manually or want to use a different source than the ones mentioned above, You need to get compatible dictionary files for your language. You need two files files ending with .aff and .dic. These files must then be copied to the following location:

C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Local\enchant\hunspell

This assumes your user profile is stored at C:\Users\<USER>. The last one or two folders may not exist, so you may need to create them.

You can find the various dictionaries on the Free Desktop website.

Note

The Free Desktop link points to a repository, and what may look like file links inside the dictionary folder are actually links to web pages. If you right-click and download those, you get HTML files, not dictionaries!

In order to download the actual dictionary files, right-click the “plain” label at the end of each line and download that.