Spell Check Dictionaries

If you wish to add a different dictionary to Chaos Intellect or Time & Chaos to allow the Spell Check feature to be appropriate for the words you type, we are pleased to offer you the following choices:

Language Dictionaries

Afrikaans
American
Aussie
Brazilian Portuguese
British
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
German ("Old" Std German)
German - New ("New" Std German)
Hungarian
Italian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish

To make these dictionaries available to our software, unzip the file and move the .adm to the Program Files folder where your application is installed. There will already be an "american.adm" file there which is included with the installation of the main program.

Specialized Dictionaries

Technical
Words from mathematics, statistics, computing, accounting and other scientific areas.
Includes British & American spellings.
Medical
American Spellings.
Legal
American Spellings.
Latin

More about the Spelling and Dictionaries

The first thing to know is that there are two dictionary types used with the spelling engine:

Language Dictionaries - These dictionaries are generally used to represent the set of correctly spelled words for a particular language or field. They contain only correctly spelled words and are not modified while checking spelling.
Custom Dictionaries - These dictionaries typically represent a supplement to a language dictionary. They can be actively modified while checking spelling and can represent correctly spelled words that have been 'Added' to the dictionary, auto-corrections and forbidden words.

Selecting dictionaries within the spelling checker's configuration dialog is straightforward. A simple way to get there is to misspell a word intentionally, then right click on the word and choose 'Spelling', then on the popup dialog press the 'Options...' button.

When you click on the Language tab, the first option you see is the drop-down in the 'Language Settings' box. This controls which language is the primary language being used for checking documents. Set this to the language your documents are typically written in.

If this option doesn't contain your preferred language you can download and install other dictionaries from the list above.

The second option you see is the 'Additional dictionaries' list. This list contains all additional dictionaries that were found on your computer. Place a checkbox beside any dictionary you want to supplement your preferred language.

The 'Locate Dictionaries...' button can be used to browse for a folder containing dictionary files. This is useful for pointing the spelling engine at downloaded dictionaries. Once you've selected a folder of dictionaries they should then show up in the 'Additional dictionaries' list.

While language dictionaries are fixed lists of words that are considered correctly spelled, custom dictionaries, on the other hand are smaller, dynamic lists that serve as the destination for words that you add to a dictionary during a spelling check. You can control and review previous additions to your custom dictionary by using the 'Custom Dictionary' tab of the spelling configuration dialog.

The first option you see is the drop down controlling the target custom dictionary for words you 'Add' to a dictionary during a spelling check.

Below the custom dictionary selection you have the ability to edit the contents of the custom dictionary.

Editing is split into three sections of interest:

Adds - These are words that have been added to the custom dictionary during a spelling check.

Whenever the spelling engine encounters these words they will be considered correctly spelled.

Auto-Corrections - These are pairs of words that have been added to the custom dictionary during a spelling check whenever the 'Auto-Correct' button is pressed. They represent a misspelled word and the correctly spelled version of the word.

Whenever the spelling engine encounters the misspelled word it will be automatically replaced with the correctly spelled version of the word.

Exclusions - These are words that will always be considered misspelled, regardless of the context. Words aren't added to this list during a spelling check - they are added through this dialog as needed.

Whenever the spelling engine encounters a word in this list it will always be considered misspelled, even if it is present in another dictionary. This mechanism can be used to outlaw terms that are acceptable in the language as a whole, but are not acceptable for certain applications.

Please note that if you don't have the automatic spell correction turned on, the auto-correction and exclusion tabs don't apply and won't be shown.