Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Word 2003

Creating Custom Dictionaries for Custom Needs

When you use Word's spell checker to add words to your dictionary, Word stores these in a custom dictionary file called custom.dic. It then consults custom.dic whenever you run a spell check—thereby making sure that it doesn't flag words as incorrect that you indicated are accurate. If you want, you can also create other custom dictionaries—up to 10—for special purposes. For example, if you do legal editing on only Tuesdays and Thursdays, you can maintain a legal custom dictionary and use it on only those days.

The following sections show you how to work with Word's custom dictionaries.

Creating a New Custom Dictionary

To create a new custom dictionary, choose Tools, Options, Spelling & Grammar, and ...