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Put KJV words in Mac OS X dictionary


JohnOMalley

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In the seminar in Atlanta today I asked if there was a way to put all the Accordance Bible words from the KJV into the OS X Snow Leopard Dictionary program. Mark, the instructor, urged me to post this on the forum for an answer.

 

Does anyone know how to do it?

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Keep in mind that the more alternate spellings you put in your dictionary, the more likely you are not to notice when you misspell something yourself. For example, if you are in the United States, you may not notice when you use a British spelling of a word—colour for color and the like.

 

Having given the above warning, there is a way to do this. I've often done it myself over the years for the purpose of adding biblical names and places to Word's dictionary, but I've always used a more modern translation than the KJV so that changes in spelling current words wouldn't be confused.

 

In the old days, you could export all of a Bible's text to RTF format, but it's limited to 1000 verses at a time now. So, this will take some work, but with patience, you can export the entire KJV out of Accordance 1000 verses at a time. A quicker way might be to just get the Project Gutenberg KJV text.

 

If you're using Accordance, select your thousand verses and choose "Save text selection." You can choose from either plain text or RTF. It really doesn't matter which. Open the exported file in TextEdit which uses the OS X spelling dictionary. iWork Pages probably works for this too, but I know for certain that MS Word has its own dictionary file separate from the system wide spelling dictionary.

 

In TextEdit, under the Edit menu, choose "Spelling and Grammar" and then "Show Spelling and Grammar." This will be easier than scanning through the document yourself, right-clicking on every red line because it will jump to the next misspelled word for you. As you come to words you want to add, press the "Learn" button.

 

That should do it!

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There ought to be an easier way than manually clicking every word. In MS Word the spelling dictionary is a plain text file which can be added to in any text editor--including Word itself. (There is a biblical-theological dictionary posted on my web site that does just that--though not all "Bible words"--you can find all 2600 words here: http://www.ntresources.com/btd.htm ) I would think that the system-wide dictionary in OS X should be similarly editable, but I've never heard if that is so or how, or even what file and where it is stored. Does anyone know any specifics on format or location?

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Thank you for both responses.

 

Agreed, there should be an easier way. My preferred Word Processor is not Word. So, hopefully someone will help.

 

Many thanks!

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The Snow Leopard dictionary for Spelling is easy. Just go to file:///Users/<username>/Library/Spelling/LocalDictionary, where <username> is your local username, and open the LocalDictionary. It should open in TextEdit. Paste or add as many words as you want making sure they are each on a separate line. Save the file in the same location with the same name (just select save from the File menu). Log out and back in and you will be using your new dictionary.

 

I can't figure out an easy way to create a list of all the words from a text, such as the King James Bible, in Accordance. If so, you could just copy it to the clipboard and paste into your LocalDictionary.

 

Fred

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If you search the text for Words using an asterisk *, and then click Details and Analysis, you get a list of all the words. In Set Analysis Display you can choose not to display the count, and to list the words by frequency if you prefer. This gives you 13,760 different forms.

 

I suggest that for this purpose you may want exclude the most common words, and pehaps those that occur only once (although there are a surprising number of ordinary words that occur only once, not just the obscure names). You can do this by searching for [COUNT 2-1000], or any other range that you deem appropriate. This search of the entire Bible takes much longer, but yields 9,218 forms.

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That's helpful. Do you know if the system library can be used for the same purpose so that all users access the same local dictionary? (i.e., HD/Library/Spelling rather than /Users/[userName]/Library/Spelling) That directory exists but is empty on my Mac.

 

I also wonder if there are size constraints or at least reasonable limits? Word tends to choke when its spelling dictionary gets much beyond 3,000 words per dictionary (but you can have multiple dictionaries). Is Mac limited to one local dictionary?

 

My guess is that adding all the "Bible words" (esp from a transl. with many archaic spellings) would be a bad idea. And you certainly wouldn't want to just add all of them anyway since many are already in the main dictionary. At the least after generating a potential list with Accordance's search options (see Helen's post), you'd want to put it into a text document and edit it heavily. It's not hard to whack out large numbers of words when there is a long string that do not show as misspelled. Once you got it whittled down to a few thousand, then you could copy that list into the local dictionary. (I don't know if there's a limit on how many words you can paste at a time.)

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There ought to be an easier way than manually clicking every word. In MS Word the spelling dictionary is a plain text file which can be added to in any text editor--including Word itself. (There is a biblical-theological dictionary posted on my web site that does just that--though not all "Bible words"--you can find all 2600 words here: http://www.ntresources.com/btd.htm ) I would think that the system-wide dictionary in OS X should be similarly editable, but I've never heard if that is so or how, or even what file and where it is stored. Does anyone know any specifics on format or location?

 

Thanks for making this available, Ron! This is a very helpful resource.

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This is wonderful and precisely what I needed. The instructor from Atlanta, (I forgot his name), wanted to know how to do this too. Would someone let him know?

 

Thanks!

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