MacOS – the system spellchecking dictionaries

dictionarymacosspelling

I would like to use the spellchecking dictionaries bundled with OS X from the command line (hunspell), but can't seem to find them. In /System/Library/Spelling there are only 2 files pl_PL.{aff,dic}, and find / -name '*.dic' revealed nothing.

I know I can dowload dictionaries from OpenOffice etc., but I'd like to find the ones bundled with OS X.

EDIT To clarify, there are at least two kinds of dictionaries in OS X:

  • Definitions used in Dictionary.app. I'm not interested in those.
  • Word lists used by the system spellchecker (red dotted lines). I know OS X uses hunspell because the hunspell website says so, and there are numerous posts on how to add new ones (1, 2). Just, I don't want to add new ones but use the English one that obviously comes with the system.

Best Answer

The spelling dictionaries you are interested in appear to be located in the following location (checked on 10.8.4 and 10.6.8):

/System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources/

The word lists are stored in this directory by language, so U.S. English is in the English.lproj folder.

However, these files are stored in a binary format that I haven't deciphered yet...

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