How can I refresh the macOS dictionary?
Consider the following workflow:
- Open TextEdit.
- Type a word that's not in the dictionary.
- Right-click on that word and select 'Learn Spelling'.
- Observe the squiggly underline disappears, as the word is now recognised.
- Observe the word is added to the
~/Spelling/LocalDictionary
file. - Quit TextEdit.
- Remove the word from the
~/Spelling/LocalDictionary
file. - Reopen TextEdit.
- Type the same word again.
- Observe it is still recognised (not squiggly-underlined), despite no longer being in the local dictionary.
It seems the problem here is that there is some sort of cache maintained by macOS that is not refreshed. If I right-click on the word in TextEdit to remove it from the local dictionary instead of editing the file, it is indeed no longer recognised; i.e., this appears to update the cache.
Is there any way I can manually refresh the cache of local dictionary words?
I figured this out myself in the end. One needs to relaunch the com.apple.applespell
service (from the command line).
launchctl stop com.apple.applespell
launchctl start com.apple.applespell