Exclusion Dictionary

An exclusion dictionary is a list of words that Microsoft Office will always flag as misspelled. How is this helpful? Let’s look at an example:

For more information, please contact the Office of Pubic Affairs.

Don’t worry if you missed it. Spell check would miss it too! The difference between “public” and “pubic” is only one letter, but what a difference a letter makes! The problem is, “pubic” is a perfectly valid word! By putting it in an exclusion dictionary, Microsoft Office products will always flag that word as misspelled.

  1. Browse to C:\Users\[CB#]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof.

    • Copy the text %appdata%\Microsoft\UProof to your clipboard.

    • Double-click the Computer icon in the top left of your computer desktop, or hit the Windows Key plus the E key to open Windows Explorer. Then click on the right-hand side of the address bar, highlighted in red in the below figure.

      Windows Explorer, showing where to click in the address bar

    • Paste the text into the address bar then hit Enter.

      Windows Explorer, showing the pasted string with your CB number inserted

      Windows Explorer, the contents of your UProof folder (yours will vary)

  2. Open the file ExcludeDictionaryEN1009.lex.

    • Right-click the file and select Open with….

      Right-click on the exclusion dictionary file

    • Click on More apps.

      Select “More apps”

    • Select Notepad (or another text editor, if you prefer), make sure the “Always use this app” checkbox is checked, then click OK.

      Select Notepad

    The file will then open for editing. From now on, you can simply double-click the file to open it.

  3. Add whatever words you want. Order doesn’t matter, but capitalization does. If a word is lowercase in the dictionary, it will flag both upper- and lowercase versions. If the word is uppercase in the dictionary, it will only flag the uppercase version. Here’s how your final dictionary might look. Add whatever words you find cause you trouble.

    Sample exclusion dictionary

A final note: The dictionary you just edited was for Canadian English, which is the default language on AER machines. If you edit in other languages, you’ll need to copy this dictionary to those languages, too. Here are the common codes.

Language 2-letter code 4-digit code (hex)
English - Canada EN 1009
English - United Kingdom EN 0809
English - United States EN 0409
French - Canada FR 0c0c
French - France FR 040c

For a complete list, see the Microsoft specification (but note that the language code needs to be converted to hexadecimal): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards/ms-oe376/6c085406-a698-4e12-9d4d-c3b0ee3dbc4a.