Chris Schuld's Blog

personal musings on the composition of software

Written By: Chris Schuld Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

Question: I just accidentally added a misspelled word to Firefox’s built in dictionary — how do I remove it?

This is a good question! Thankfully, someone at Mozilla decided the user dictionary should be stored in plain text and newline delimited. A big thank you from Chris on this one!

The only challenge is locating your Profile and then your personal / user dictionary file. The personal dictionary is called persdict.dat and lives in your Firefox Profile folder.

The Firefox Profile Folder is located in different places depending on what Operating System you are using:

  • Windows XP:
    C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\????????.default\
  • Windows Vista:
    C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\????????.default\
  • Mac OS X:
    ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/????????.default/
  • Linux:
    ~/.mozilla/firefox/????????.default/

If you are using Windows XP or Windows Vista you can quickly jump to the directory by typing “%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\” into the run box (click on Start–>Run).
Mozilla Profiles Path

Once you have found your profile folder you need to edit the persdict.dat file. Using your favorite text editor open up that file and edit out / add in the words you desire.

You will need to restart Firefox before it will see any words you updated.

Categories: Firefox

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Chris Schuld

Thank you for visiting my website. I use this site for a myriad of things: maintaining software I have open sourced, connecting with my readers and friends and documenting all of this little things "I wished I would have written down." You can read more about me or contact me.


thanks for visiting... happy coding

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