Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I am writing a fantasy novel and i have to build a custom dictionary to handle the words for my novel: Names of places,the various races, and characters that populate my world; at the current moment I have more than ten thousand entries in that dictionary. BUT I also have more than an additional five to six thousand more that I need to add to the dictionary, the main body of the dictionary I have built over the past three plus years as I have written my novel, and the million plus words one additional word at a time, or a few hundred at a time, but it has come to the point where i now need to add several thousand names and other data to the dictionary and I REALLY do not want to do it by clicking on each individual word and then clicking again on the window that pops up and selecting to add to my dictionary! Is there a simple way that i can just copy and past the names into the existing dictionary and have them recognized, or do the words have to be processed by the word processor software in order for them to be used within the dictionary?

any suggestion would be greatly appreciated, since I will be looking at about twenty hours of clicking and selecting just for one list of names which is more than 3800! And that is the smaller of the two lists that I have to add top the dictionary!

Thank you for reading and i hope that someone may be able to assist me!

Louis Wesler

I am more than willing to concede to those with more knowledge of Writer than I have, however, my research indicates that there isn't currently any way of mass adding entries to a spell check dictionary.
It appears that your only options are to use the method you have already noted, or go through Tools -> Options -> Language Settings -> Writing Aids -> User-defined dictionaries -> Edit (if you want to edit one of the dictionaries shown) or New (to create a new dictionary). If you go with New you will still have to use the Edit option to edit the new dictionary, but with the New option you could keep the entries that are specific to your book restricted to their own dictionary.
Using the Edit option will enable you to manually enter each word that you want added one at a time.
Personally I can't see that second option being much if any faster than adding them via the document you're already writing.

This topic may be of some help. Just substitute the name of your dictionary as appropriate.

And of course make a backup of your dictionary file before you start.

Good find, robleyd. My search missed that or I missed seeing it in my search results.

Laziness on my part - I know how to find and edit the custom dictionary; but I hoped someone else had already done the description so I didn't have to write it out again

thank you all for the input I was afraid that the answer would be that I have go through the 3480PLUS names one at a time to add them to the special dictionary, ah well such is life of the author, i just hope that i live long enough to get the damn thing published. explanation I am 71 and have been working on this for almost five years currently have over a 1.8 million words and almost the equivalent of 6 books written, if you compare what i have already written to what JRR Tolkien has had published. so i=I would like to try and have the first book published by my next birthday in May next year! Am going to be shooting for that at least, and then will have to see about the other five that I have already written! thank you all have agreat day and be on the llok out for The Seventh House, a book on the Seventh House of the Dwarven Kingdoms the Blackbbeards as manifested in Tolkien's writings. :-0

That's a piece of work!

Back to your issue, I guess that a good deal of the job will be to produce the list itself (alphabetical sorting is trivial).
Then, if you have words that can have different endings (plurals...), it may be helpful to check how the regular dictionaries work so that you can add rules to these words and avoid adding all the possible possibilities in the list of the custom dictionary.