Deleting misspelled words from the dictionary
Have you ever added a new term or a new drug to your spell check dictionary only to learn later that you had the incorrect spelling? Have you “inherited” a computer from another employee who incorrectly added terms to the spell check dictionary? If you need to edit the dictionary, read on…. First I will explain how Stedmans Medical Speller and MS Word work together. When you load Stedmans, the medical terms are merged with the Standard English dictionary that loads with your copy of MS Word (called the main dictionary and designated with the extension lex). You will not see a separate file for Stedmans on your computer. When you spell check a document, MS Word compares each word in the document with the list of words in the main dictionary (which now contains medical terms). If the word is not on the list, Word will mark the “misspelled” word with a red sawtooth line. Since the user is not allowed to open or edit the main dictionary, MS Word provides a second “dictionary” that can be edited. This file is named Custom.dic. If you need to add a new drug name, a new instrument or procedure name that is not already included in the main dictionary, simply choose the Add command during spell check. This will add the new word to the Custom.dic and Word will no longer identify the word as misspelled. If you had incorrect information and added a new term to your dictionary and later learned it was not right, you can remove this misspelled word from the Custom.dic. Also, it is easy to accidentally click the Add command, especially if you use the right-click shortcut menu to spell check a document. If you immediately realize you have added a word to the dictionary that is not spelled correctly, press CTL+Z (the undo command) to reverse the entry. If you later realize you have added a word to your Custom dictionary that is not spelled correctly, you can delete the word from the custom dictionary file. Go to Tools/Options and select the Spelling and Grammar tab. Click the button in the middle labeled “Dictionaries….”. Make sure the Custom.dic is selected and then click “Edit”. A box will appear reminding you that editing the custom dictionary will turn spell check off. Click OK. A document named Custom.dic will open. Edit this document as you would any other Word document. You can add or delete words on this list. You can also correct capitalization errors. Close the document and then be sure to go back to the Spelling and Grammar tab and replace the check mark at “Check Spelling As You Type”.
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