A little dictionary rant

One nice little feature about Word that I appreciate are the personalized dictionaries you are able to create, tied to your account it is available on all device. But limited to Office apps. I’d really like that to be OS wide. Allow me to explain.

I write a fair amount on Japanese history and am fully aware that this is an esoteric topic for most people. Hence, in my texts you encounter a lot of historical Japanese figures and terminology, like Sengoku era, Kinai or Keicho period. I enter those words in to a personal dictionary and then autocorrect accepts them next time I write them in Word. But not in Edge, or any other browser. Safari is notorious for correcting it after I typed another five words or three sentences, hence I don’t realize that they have been changed.

Another thing is that it would be great if those personalized dictionaries could be uploaded and then crowd sourced for others who might need them. When I enter archaic terms in Japanese, the IME don’t understand them (understandably) and I have allowed MS to collect them in order to improve their IME. It would be nice to get something back. In the shape of platform crossover OS wide personalized dictionaries. Maybe in a hierarchy so you could choose specific one’s for specific projects?

3 Likes

For Safari shouldn’t it work to add the words to a custom dictionary for Mac OS X? You’ll have to enter them twice, but that’s a consequence of using a word processor which uses a different programming toolkit.

Unfortunately I don’t use Macs. PC, Android and iPads.

Doesn’t iPadOS offer custom dictionaries as Mac OS X does?

It has to be entered manually in Settings->Keyboard.

I might be barking up the wrong tree but what if you used a freebie page layout / publishing application like Scribus to set up your texts? It’s a while since I used Quark or Indesign but they didn’t autocorrect or you could at least turn it off.
You could then export an ePub or similar file if you were publishing your texts?

Obviously, lack of auto-correct means that other mis-spells might not get noticed.

1 Like

That would undoubtedly be convenient, unfortunately most of my clients provide Word templates that they require me to follow.

1 Like