Practical Vim

Tip 114

Autocomplete Words from the Dictionary

Vim’s dictionary autocompletion builds a list of suggestions from a word list. We can configure Vim so that dictionary autocompletion uses the same word list as the built-in spell checker.

Sometimes we might want to use autocompletion on a word that isn’t present in any of our open buffers, included files, or tags. In that case, we can always resort to looking it up in the dictionary. This can be triggered by running the <C-x><C-k> command (see compl-dictionary​).

To enable this feature, we need to supply Vim with a suitable word list. The easiest way to do this is by running :set spell to enable ...