How can I see some or all of the individual word differences between the built-in dictionaries. I'm curious and inspired by this question where the UK typically adds the suffix -ise and USA typically spells it -ize.
It would be nice to to see the differences between these variants from the list of languages/dictionaries available in Mac OS X.
- Australian English
- British English
- Canadian English
- U.S. English
In originally asking this question, I thought that the spelling was controlled by the Language tab in the Language & Text preference pane, but have since learned that there is a Spelling option under the Text tab of the same preference pane (is that new in Snow Leopard?). From here it appears that other dictionaries can be easily imported (in aff or dic file format) which would lead me to believe that the spelling dictionaries are a standard format that may be read by other tools. However, the /Library/Spelling folder doesn't have any files.
As a bonus, it would be great to know how the language variants under the Language tab are used and why the variants there don't match up to the spelling dictionary.