While I was writing another post for OS X 411, I mistakenly added the word Cyrsis to Leopard’s built-in spell checker, I wasn’t paying attention, but after looking at the word more carefully (after it was added) I noticed it was misspelled. The proper spelling is Crysis, which I assumed Leopard didn’t know anyway, thats how this started… 

Most applications in Leopard that use the built-in spell checker allow you to add words to the dictionary, but not all of them allow you to remove or “unlearn” the learned words. Pages is a perfect example, it will allow you to add words to the spell checker but not remove them. Below I have an example of where I’ve added “Robetr” to the spell checker.

I’ve found two ways to remove a “learned” word from the Leopard spell checker, the first is to open TextEdit and type the word, right-click the word and select “Unlearn Spelling” from the popup (thats it, you’re done). 

If you used the TextEdit method above this is not needed (just an alternate way of removing learned words for the more curious). The second way I’ve found is to edit a file located at ~/Library/Spelling/en (en is the file name (for English I assume), and the Library folder located in your home folder). Open this file in any text editor (TextEdit even works) and remove the word from the list. Once the file is saved logout and you have just unlearned a word. This would also be a practical way to unlearn all the words known by Leopard. Note: The Spelling directory is only created if you have learned words, on a fresh install of OS X the Spelling directory doesn’t exist. It also seems that this file is not synced with the spell checker live, if you delete a name it will still show up as correct until you logout.