Mac OS X Leopard only includes spell check support for about 9 distinct languages; English (4 varieties of), German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Danish, and Portugese (2 varieties of). You would think that if you did not speak any of these languages Apple would have provided some downloadable Apple Dictionary dictionaries (.dict) on their site which other foreign language speakers could install. Sadly this is not the case.Recently I was looking to provide Croatian language spell check for a friend and ended up finding a solution for almost all foreign languages!

The solution is the OS X port of Aspell, the open source spell check software, called CocoAspell. CocoAspell installs an OS X System Preference pane and comes bundled with a few dictionaries. Additional spell check dictionaries can be downloaded from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/0index.html

There are many Aspell dictionaries, including ones for Polish, Bulgarian, Czech, Greek, Norwegian, Malay, Croatian, Macedonian, Indonesian, Welsh, Afrikaans, Icelandic, Kurdi, Romanian, Slovak, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic and Zulu.

Additional dictionaries are installed by placing the uncompressed dictionary folder in /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell and then re-launching the cocoAspell System Preference pane. Activate the dictionaries by ticking them in the pref pane.Once activated the language you wish to spell check must then be selected in the TextEdit’s ‘Spelling and Grammar’ window: Edit > Spelling and Grammar > Show Spelling and Grammar. Apps must be re-launched to recognise the change in dictionary.

CocoAspell only provides spell check support for OS X apps like TextEdit, Safari and Pages, and other 3rd party apps that hook in to Dictionary.app. CocoAspell does not provide spell check support for MS Office for Mac. Spell check solutions for unsupported languages in Word rely on creating a custom dictionary. A tutorial on this process will be published shortly.

Aspell is an active project and new dictionaries are being produced the whole time.

Enjoy!

1. alibeyköy merkez giremez herkez çırçır tayfası:, January 28, 2010:

   Please I need to know which language these words belongs to??? can anybody please help me.

2. Laura, March 24, 2010:

   My guess would be Turkish

3. Angel, April 16, 2010:

   I can’t understand how Apple only give support for 9 different languages! This support is extremelly poor and grammar correction for all the languages should be a basic function includded in MacOSX or text processing apps.