Firefox Dictionary – How to Change Firefox’s Default Dictionary

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It's aboot time I asked this one. Firefox thinks I'm Canadian.

I've got absolutely nothing against Canadians and their spelling is a lot better than Americans' but I don't spell specialised with a z. There are other, similar issues where I'm writing something and suddenly the dunce-squiggle pops up.

Anyway… How on earth does one set the default language? Can I remove English (Canada) completely?

Some clarifications as to why some of these answers aren't right for me, but might be right for somebody else:

  • Select another dictionary in Firefox by right clicking a textarea — This didn't hold between sessions. I would quit Firefox sipping my cup of tea, start it back up and be halfway through O Canada.

  • Remove the Canadian dictionary from Firefox — Simple: I didn't have it installed. The only dictionary language pack I had installed in Firefox is GB.

In my case I had somehow installed system-wide dictionary packages for en_CA and en_ZA. I've still no idea why or even how these kept replacing the Firefox default because I also have a system-wide en_GB dictionary package. Very odd. Package.

Best Answer

Firefox seems to use myspell/hunspell and listing /usr/share/myspell/dicts/ shows me the dictionaries that I'm given options to use:

$ ls -1 /usr/share/myspell/dicts/*.dic
/usr/share/myspell/dicts/en_CA.dic 
/usr/share/myspell/dicts/en_GB.dic
/usr/share/myspell/dicts/en_ZA.dic
...

Search for the dictionary filename in installed packages:

$ dpkg -S /usr/share/myspell/dicts/en_CA.dic
hunspell-en-ca: /usr/share/myspell/dicts/en_CA.dic

So with the Canadian language package name, the fix is to remove it:

sudo apt-get remove hunspell-en-ca
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