How to remove a word from Visual Studio 2022's Spell Checker dictionary?

Question

While writing some C++ code in Visual Studio 2022. I misspelled a word in a comment and right clicked on it to select the correct spelling and accidentally clicked Add word to dictionary and added the misspelling to the dictionary.

How do I remove it from the dictionary?

Answer 1

There's a file called exclusion.dic in your %localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<Version> directory

In my case: C:\Users\itsme\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\17.0_ebf473c1\exclusion.dic

It's a simple text file which can be edited:

Using the explorer search to find the file in on of the sub directories of %localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio might help:

Exclusion Dictionary Encoding

Another issue many folks ran into was around the encoding of the exclusion dictionaries used by the spell checker. Visual Studio will use the exclusion dictionary specified by the spelling_exclusion_path switch in your editorconfig file or an “exclusion.dic” file in your %localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio<Version> directory if a switch can’t be found. In either case, the spell-checking APIs required the exclusion file to have “UTF-16 with BOM” encoding to work correctly. We got multiple reports of the encoding becoming corrupted, particularly when users manually modified these files to remove excluded words.

Answer 2

I encountered the same issue where I added a word to be ignored in the dictionary and couldn't revert it.

I found a solution on the VSSpellChecker website.

If you navigate to C:\Users\YourUser\AppData\Local\EWSoftware\Visual Studio Spell Checker, you'll find the .dic files.

This files contains the words that you've added to the dictionary. You can delete or add new words directly in this file.

Remember to restart all your Visual Studio instances for the changes to take effect.