How do I use a list of Words that I want MS Word to mark as wrong?

Exclusion dictionaries are specific to a certain language, so you have created one for US English, and therefore that language has to be applied to the text for it to work. It was, I guess, my assumption that entering the word in lowercase would make it apply to C&lc or CAPS, and it does seem to work that way for me, so I don't know what to tell you about that.

You have to add the words to an "exclusion" dictionary. See http://wordfaqs.ssbarnhill.com/ExcludeWordFromDic.htm

Dear Chris Haynes1

Good day! Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. We are happy to help you

You can create a custom dictionary in Microsoft Word to mark specific words as misspelled. Here are the steps to create a custom dictionary:

1. Open Microsoft Word and click on the "File" tab.
2. Click on "Options" and then select "Proofing".
3. Click on "Custom Dictionaries" and then click on "New".
4. Type a name for your custom dictionary and then click "Save".
5. Click on "Add" and then browse to the location where you have saved your list of words.
6. Select the file and click "Open".
7. Click "OK" to close the "Custom Dictionaries" dialog box.
8. Click "OK" to close the "Word Options" dialog box.

Now, when you run a spell check, Word will mark any words in your custom dictionary as misspelled. You can then choose to ignore or change the spelling of those words as needed.

Please feel free to correct me if my understanding is wrong. We look forward to your reply. Thanks for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

Tin | Microsoft Community Moderator

Hi Suzanne,

You've taught this old dog a new trick. I'd never heard of an exclusion dictionary until your post. I added the words grey, greying, greyly, levelled and plough to the exclusion library and after some trial and error, I finally got Word to start using the exclusion dictionary. It found those words and marked them as misspelled, which is what I was looking for. I had to change the preferred language from English US to something else and back again before Word would start excluding newly added words to the exclusion dictionary (I had to do that even after restarting Word).

One question though: all of the words in the exclusion dictionary are lowercase, per your instructions, and Word flags words like "grey" but not "Grey" or "GREY". Is there a way to get it to catch the capitalized versions of the words in the exclusion list too?

Thank you for your help!

I did try to use a custom dictionary but, in my original example, MS Word thinks "grey", "levelled" and "plough" are valid spellings even if we have "gray", "leveled" and "plow" in our custom dictionary. Our custom word list, which is an Excel Spreadsheet, has approximately 2000 entries in it. One column has the words we want to search for and the second column has the words we want to replace it with. If the list was only 10 or 20 words, find and replace would be our best bet. But since the list has 2000 entries, search and replace would be too time consuming. If there was a way to automate the search and replace process using the spreadsheet, that would be ideal. But if there was a way to force Word to use the list of words to search for and flag them as being misspelled, even if it is a valid spelling, that would be OK too. We have words like "gamer", "comer", "stem" in our custom list of words to search for because we want to replace them with "garner", "corner" and "stern" but Word doesn't flag those words as being misspelled because they are valid words. Adding the words we want to the custom dictionary doesn't help. Does that make sense; am I explaining it correctly?