Ubuntu – How to remove all that country-specific dictionaries (like En_AU, En_CA, de_CH, etc)

dictionaryinternationalizationspell-checking

After I've installed some language packs and spell checking dictionaries (I'd like to use with Firefox and OpenOffice) I've got tons of language variations installed. This makes very inconvenient to maintain dictionary additions, for example. Sometimes Firefox decides to switch to Australian, sometimes to UK dictionary, sometimes to US, etc.

For me, a Russian, English is just English, and German is just German. I think every English-speaking will understand me, may I write "color" or "colour", "dialog", or "dialogue" (I usually prefer classic UK spelling though, as a matter of a habit (as I was taught at school)). How to remove all those dialects?

Best Answer

Emi Bcn from Launchpad said:

Look at /usr/share/hunspell/ and delete all files you don't need/want. It's all!!

It worked for me except just in case I went to myspell and aspell folders too and erased the ones I didn't need.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to download or install all of the dictionaries

Unfortunately, the various packages (e.g. wcatalan, wbritish-large wbritish-small, …) don't follow a pattern so

 apt-get install words-\*

or similar will not work. Typing /usr/share/dict into the search box of Software Center appears to yield all the wordlists, but I don't know if that is exhaustive.

If you want spell checking without the wordlists,

 sudo apt-get install aspell-\*

will pull in the (larger set) of spell checkers which work on a larger set of languages but cannot yield the wordlist used to compile them.

Be forewarned, given the way the wordlists were generated (cf. Steve Johnson CACM v28 1985) from words and proper nouns actually encountered in documents, the extra words might not be obviously jargon or proper to a non-native speaker)

Ubuntu – Spell check and locale

A corresponding question was asked about Thunderbird. The solution provided there worked for me:

go to go to /usr/share/hunspell/
delete the languages you do not want (e.g. rm de_BE.* to delete Belgian German)

I am not sure why you got the message about incomplete language support - I didn't have that problem.

But in addition, you may still have manually installed dictionaries in Firefox. Interestingly, just disabling/uninstalling wasn't enough (e.g. via Tools | Add-Ons). To get rid of the languages I didn't like, I went to ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/extensions and deleted the dictionalry-folders e.g. rm -r de_BE* that did the trick.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – How to download or install all of the dictionaries

Ubuntu – Spell check and locale

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