Fixing Your Dictionary

Your are typing some text into your FIrefox 2.0 Browser, and you spell something terribly wrong. Like this:

I am so glad I upgreaded to Firefox 2.0, because it has a built in spell checker.

You see the error where you meant to type "upgraded." So you right click on it to pick the correct spelling, and accidentally hit the "Add to Dictionary" menu choice, which is annoyingly placed right next to the correctly spelled word.

From now on, you can never be sure if your text will be correct. Bummer.

There is a way to fix this.

In Linux, go to a terminal window.

Change the directory to where Firefox stores the dictionary file. Thiis in your home directory, in a subdirectory with a "dot" at the beginning of the name (to make it invisible), then a couple of subdirectories down below that. The file you are looking for is called "persdict.dat"

Most likely, you can just type this into the terminal window:

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default

and that will bring you to the default configuration file. The "star" is because the exact name of your configuration file is unknown to me. Your Linux system will open to the first directory that fits this "wildcard."

Now type "ls" to see if you see a persdict.dat.

If it was me, I'd then type:

gedit persdict.dat

so you can edit the dictionary in a nice word processor (Gedit).

An even more direct approach which may work nicely is to go to the terminal window and simply type in this command:

gedit ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/persdict.dat

Either way, edit the file, save it, and you're cool.