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Home/Mac OSX/Apple OSX Dictionary to Proper British English (Oxford / OED )

Apple OSX Dictionary to Proper British English (Oxford / OED )

The system Dictionary in Mac OSX defaults to American English – which isn’t very useful if you are British, European or Asian ( India and throughout the middle and far east) since they mostly use British English.

So I did a little digging and realised, as always, that there are options in the dictionary program.

By default the dictionary is American:
Osx dictionary english 1

If you open the Preferences (from the menu bar)
Osx dictionary english 2

And scroll down a bit, you can select the British Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus:
Osx dictionary english 3

As you can see in the toolbar, you now have many dictionaries available. Of course you don’t want the American dictionary at all if you live in England.

You can click and drag the dictionary up to the top, unselect the American Dictionary.

Osx dictionary english 4

And now the toolbar shows the dictionaries you have selected.

Pro Tip

If you are using a Trackpad on OSX Lion, you can select a word with a one finger double tap, then use a three finger double tap to open the Dictionary directly like this in a popup menu.

Osx dictionary english 5

System Language

Note that you should already have set your system language to British English in the System Preferences:

Osx dictionary english 6

You can edit which languages are available by clicking the Edit List button and selecting the language you wish to use.

Osx dictionary english 7

Published on:28 August , 2011 Last Modified: August 28, 2011

Categories: Mac OSXTags: Mac OSX

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Greg is the Co-Founder of Packet Pushers Interactive LLC, speaker,co-host of the Packet Pushers Podcast and analyst.

I'm a recovering Network Architect/Engineer who survived 25 years of Corporate IT . You can hire me for contract work, freelance or ad hoc work by the hour.

Packet Pushers is the largest weekly data networking podcast in the world delivering 500K downloads per month.

I'm also professional writer, presenter, speaker and author.

My technical site is EtherealMind.com. Sometimes I speak at events.

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