How do I remove the US English dictionary?

[Total Loss]

We have recently rolled out Microsoft Office 2003 (fully service packed and
updated) and are having an issue with the dictionary used by all the office
applications. I have set all the options to use English (UK) as the default
dictionary; but this although it sets it as the default it still allows US
American spelling to creep in to our documents, emails etc as the US
dictionary is not removed and will allow a word to be spelt either the
English or the American way (for example Finalised is also accepted as being
correct when spelt Finalized).

N.B. I have already set all Windows XP settings to default to UK English
also and set the default language for all Office applications to be UK
English from "Office 2003 Language Settings".

Thanks for your help in advance,

Luke

 

[Graham Mayor]

You cannot remove the US dictionary - in any case for the example you give,
according to the OED, both versions are correct. You can use an exclude
dictionary to flag your those words for which you have a preferred spelling.

Language is a formatting parameter applied to the text and imported text
(especially from web sources) will tend to bring its formatting language
with it. You can minimise the impact by using paste sppecial as unformatted
text to import text and uncheck tools > language > set language >
automatically detect.


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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Stefan Blom]

Unfortunately, having the correct settings does not eliminate the
problem from documents created with incorrect settings (or on a
different system). For a fix, see the final section of
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister/LangFmt.htm.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


in message
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[Total Loss]

Thanks for your input. So in effect what you are saying is the developers
decided that the defacto standard for English spelling is US American? Oh
well another example of a decision on how to best configure a piece of
software being taken away from the end user Using the exclude dictionary
would (and does) indeed work, it is the solution I have been suggesting to my
users - but it is an inelegant and time wasting method. The US spellings are
simply plain wrong in my country.

 

[Graham Mayor]

No that's not what I am saying. Finalized and finalised are *both* correct
in UK English. Other words with Americal spellings that are incorrect in UK
English - eg color are flagged as incorrect with the UK spelling dictionary.
If you want to limit yourself to just the one type of ending for
finalised/ized then you have that choice with the exclude dictionary.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

In addition to what Graham has said, the reason there is no way to "remove"
the US dictionary is that there is only a single lexicon for US and UK
English (there is a separate one for Australian English for some reason).
Depending on your language settings, a subset of the words in that lexicon
(the overwhelming majority of which are the same in both "languages") is
used. As Graham says, the subset used for UK English does allow variant
spellings of some words. If you want to mark one of those variants as
incorrect, see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/ExcludeWordFromDic.htm for
instructions on creating an exclusion dictionary.