OS X: British English

One of the annoying things about OS X, from a British perspective at least, is the obscure way of changing the default dictionary the operating system uses for things like spell checking. There’s a couple of ways of changing this however, depending on whether you want to do it on a per application basis, or system wide.

Per-Application

  1. Right click in an application where you’re editing text and choose the “Spelling“ → “Spelling…“ option.
  2. Then simply change the dictionary drop down to “British English“, or whatever you require.

Easy, huh?

System Wide

More usefully, you can change this for your whole system by doing the following:

  1. Open System Preferences → International from the Apple menu.
  2. Choose “Edit List“
  3. Make sure “British English“ is checked in this list, and click “OK“.
  4. Make sure that British English is now at the top of the Languages list. If it’s not, drag it to the top.
  5. Close the International System Preferences window.
  6. You may need to log out and back in for the changes to take full effect.

I hope this proves useful to someone – I know it will for me the next time I need to set up a fresh OS X install.

February 2nd, 2007 | Apple/OS X |

Comments so far...

  1. will said:

    Cool, thanks, I had been wondering how to do that!

    June 5th, 2007 at 9:24 am

Want to leave a reply?

Preview:

Meandering [RSS]

Aimless wanderings from around the big ol’ interweb…

Sleeveface
My new favourite blog.
Offbeat Guides
A really neat new service for compiling custom travel guides, which are then available as a PDF or in print. The events list for around the time of your stay is particularly nice.
KavaMovies
An interesting new application for managing your movie collection. With a few more features, this could be quite useful.
Cursebird
What the f#@! is everyone swearing about on Twitter?
Ack In Project
A Textmate bundle for using ack for project searches in Textmate. It's a ton quicker than the built in project search.
TinEye
Impressive image search technology which aims to find similar matches to images across the web.
Multicolr Flickr Search
Search 10 million Flickr images by colour.
Kayak
A really powerful flight search tool. I really like the interactive sliders for refining flight times, trip durations and the like. I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before!
Lab Tick
Manually adjust the keyboard brightness on Apple laptops - something that's not supported by the OS.
HostsWidget
Allows manipulation of /etc/hosts right from the dashboard. It also flushes the DNS cache automatically.
Zattoo
Live streaming of pretty much all UK terrestrial channels. It seems to work really well.
The Twitterverse On Glossy Displays
Considering Apple's seemingly relentless desire to give us all glossy displays, the consensus doesn't seem to be pro-gloss. That's because glossy displays are WRONG.
Earth From Above
A fantastic looking photographic exhibition in New York, running in May and June next year. See today's Boston Big Picture for many great photos from the photographer, Yann Arthus-Bertrand.
Remote Buddy
Very impressive looking remote application for Apple Touch devices to control desktop Macs.
Photo Aging Project
Dan Hanna's pretty amazing photo-a-day project, which so far has two photos for every day for the past 17 years shot in sync with the rotation of the earth around the sun.