Oops! How To Fix Your Live Writer Dictionary

If you regularly use Windows Live Writer, then you’re probably familiar with the custom dictionary. With this feature, you can right-click on any supposedly misspelled word that appears underlined with the red squiggly line and choose “add to dictionary” from the menu that appears. This is a great feature for customizing your dictionary with words, names, and acronyms you don’t want WLW to point out as being incorrectly spelled. But what if you make a mistake and add a word to the dictionary that you didn’t mean to? Luckily, this can be fixed.

After having just made this mistake myself, I quickly did an online search to discover the location of the Live Writer dictionary file. According to this post on Digital Inspiration, the WLW user dictionaries are located here:

• Windows Vista - %AppData%\Windows Live Writer\Dictionaries\userdic.tlx
• Windows XP - C:\documents and settings\<username>\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\Dictionaries\userdic.tlx

However, when I opened up that file, I could not find the word I had incorrectly added.

I’m running a version of Windows 7 with the Live Writer beta installed, so I thought that there might be another location for the file. It appears that is the case – I found the incorrect word in another file located here:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\Dictionaries\user.dic.

I think this change is related to the WLW beta being installed, not Windows 7 – can anyone confirm this?