Dictionary
 

I am puzzled about what dictionary Sigil uses for it's default.

When checking books Sigil appears to highlight a lot of 'misspelled' words that are actually in common usage and I have to keep adding them to the default dictionary.

Looking in the hunspell_dictionaries folder I see that it's empty. So should I be looking for a more comprehensive dictionary for Sigil to use?

Which OS? Which language? And can you give some examples of words you feel that language's hunspell dictionary is flagging that it should know about?

Windows 10

I downloaded the Windows-x64 Setup.exe from the Sigil release Github page.

Some words highlighted by Sigil:
misdemeanour
shambolic
cofounder
contrarian
nightlife
fundraiser

There are more but these are a few from today's checking.

Some of your words are typically hyphenated under British english variants.

co-founder
night-life
fund-raiser

There maybe more. American english variants tend to drop the hyphen in these words. See the traditional Oxford English dictionary for example.


That said, contrarian, and misdemeanour should be there. And shambolic appears to be more British slang that is not found in most US wordlists.

Nightlife and fundraiser are in the Cambridge UK Dictionary. Agreed perhaps cofounder might be an Americanisation but the others are all UK variants.

I note that Firefox (with UK dictionary installed) also flags them as misspelled so it's not just a Sigil problem.

Can you add a whole dictionary to Sigil or is it just on a word-by-word basis?

Firefox probably uses the same UK dictionary we do. Almost all projects both commercial and opensource use some variant of hunspell, as we do.

Once you collect a significant enough list, you should submit them to the hunspell UK dictionary maintainer so they can be officially added.

Until then, creating a dictionary wordlist in Sigil is the way forward.

These words are in Canadian English.
Download the en-CA dictionary (en_CA.dic and en_CA.aff files)

Here you have the latest versions of the files:
https://extensions.openoffice.org/en...che-openoffice

Download and unpack (OXT file is regular ZIP file).

Kevin Atkinson has compiled a somewhat larger en-GB dictionary that you might find helpful.
(The only word it didn't find was "cofounder.")

To install the dictionary, unzip the files to C:\Program Files\Sigil\hunspell_dictionaries. If you don't have admin rights, select Edit > Preferences > Open Preferences Location and extract the files to the \hunspell_dictionaries folder in the Sigil preferences folder.

Thanks Kevin I will keep adding them on a word-by-word basis.

Thanks Becky - I will check that out.

Thank you Doitsu. As I said cofounder was doubtful anyway, but it's good to hear the others that I pointed out are included. I will download that one and install it in Sigil.

Just another quick question about dictionaries.

Looking in the user_dictionaries folder in AppData I note that the modified date of the 'default' file was four days ago even though I have been adding words to the default dictionary over the past few days. Whereas the date of a temporary dictionary that I created for the current book I am editing has today's date.

Looking at the User Dictionary Word List in Preferences I only see the words I have added recently, but others I added some time ago have been removed.

So how often is the default dictionary updated from this word list?

Not sure I follow your question fully. So I am taking a stab at answering it.

User "dictionaries" are just simple word lists and are saved and managed as such by the user. Adding a word to ignore or ignoreAll does not add it to a wordlist. It just temporarily adds it as an entry in the primary dictionary any time the dictionary is first loaded. Reloading the primary dictionary will make it "forget" these words that were ignored.

That said, each and every time your primary dictionary is loaded, if you have selected a user wordlist, it will add that list to your primary dictionary known entries.

At least that is the way it is supposed to work.

Kevin,

I was probably not very clear with my question. I was just wondering how the words one adds to the default dictionary get saved?

What was puzzling me was that, although I have been using Sigil on a daily basis - and adding words to the default dictionary every day - the date stamp on the 'default' file in the user_dictionaries folder was four days old. I was expecting the file to be updated every time a new word is added and the date of the file to reflect that.

It's not a problem as everything appears to work as it should - just wondering that's all.

Hmm .... if you add words to the default wordlist, then its file should be updated/written to at every time. There is no other way to "remember" it between Sigil sessions.

You might try exiting out of Sigil instead of leaving Sigil open just to see if that forces the write. Or alternatively if you have the target folder already open on your OS Desktop watching, you may want to close that folder and then reopen it to see if the window itself was just not updated.

Please let us know what you find.

I have just checked this morning before opening Sigil and the 'default' file now has yesterday's date - not sure what the time was when I added the last word but the time stamp looks about right too.

I will keep an eye on it to see if it happens again - probably just a glitch.

Kevin,

I did what you suggested and had Sigil and a file manager open side-by-side when editing a book.

I noted something odd. I had created a temporary dictionary for the last book I was working on so that I could eliminate words specific to that book -mostly people's names.
I had not removed that following completion of the book, so it was presumably still active.

I have just right-clicked on a word in the current book, and then clicked on Add To Default Dictionary. Whilst doing that I was keeping an eye on the files in the user_dictionaries folder and I was surprised to see that the file for the temporary dictionary was immediately updated rather than the default (as I had selected).

I then went into preferences and removed the temporary dictionary. On returning to the code view pane the word that I had just added was once again underlined indicating it was misspelled.

I repeated the right-click add to default and this time the default file was updated.

The reason why my default file was four days old was, presumably, because all the words that I had supposedly been adding to the default dictionary were in fact being added to the temporary dictionary that I had created for the book I was editing at the time.

What that probably means is that having now removed that temporary dictionary all the words that I thought I was adding to the default are now lost.

Surely it should not work like this.