August 22

Personal Spelling Dictionary in Firefox 2

Posted by seditiousbroom

I was half asleep, sipping my first cuppa, and misspelled restaurant while typing in a text field. Okay, that's no big thing. I right click and... Doh! I selected the Add to dictionary option as opposed to the correct spelling of restaurant.

No worries. I did a little digging and found that the personal dictionary for the spell check engine used by Firefox 2 is a flat text file named persdict.dat. It is stored in the top level of Firefox profiles. If you also made this mistake and wish to fix it:

  1. Copy and paste these instructions to a handy text editor or print them. If you were editing something important before adding the wrong spelling of a word to your dictionary and you still have that web page open, copy and paste that text to a text editor as well.

  2. Close Firefox 2. FF2 must save new words to the persdict.dat file before you may edit it. That save is done after Firefox 2 is closed.

  3. Find your Firefox 2 profile. Default locations are usually as follows.

    1. Windows XP/2000: C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

    2. Windows Vista: C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

    3. Windows 95/98/Me: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

    4. Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/

    5. Mac OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/

  4. Open your profile folder. Depending on your installation, the folder may bear your user name. If it doesn't, look for a folder with a name scheme similar to xxxxxxxxx.default.

  5. Find the file named persdict.dat and open it with a text editor.

  6. Delete the incorrectly added word.

  7. Save the persdict.dat file and close it.

That's all there is to it. Reopen Firefox 2 when you're finished and the incorrect spelling will be gone from FF2's spell checking dictionary.

Copy + Paste any text you were editing back into the original web page text field, and you're golden.