More uses for the Office Exclusion Dictionary

Office Watch readers suggest some more uses for the Word/Office Exclusion Dictionary.

As Office-Watch.com explained recently, the Office Exclusion dictionary can be used to take words out of the main dictionary. In other words, to ensure a word gets the red squiggly line.

We had some suggestions for using the exclusion dictionary and our readers, bless you, had some more ideas.

Avoid cross-country embarrasment

Gerald C. reminded us of the words that are OK in one part of the world but not so great elsewhere. For that reason, you might want to put ‘fanny‘ in the exclusion dictionary to save embarrassment if your document is read in Britain.

Awful modern words

From all sides came the excellent idea of putting disliked terms into the exclusion list. One example is the loathed ‘transitioning‘ which is acceptable to some but considered a stain on the language by others. Word 365 is OK with ‘transitioning’ grrrrr.

There are disliked terms such as ‘efforting‘ (“We are efforting towards a meeting at head office”). The current Microsoft Office English dictionary red underlines ‘Efforting’ but Barry J. has added it to his company’s exclusion list as a precaution against it being in a future dictionary update.

From all sides came votes in favor of our feature requests to Microsoft. The custom and exclusion dictionaries system are long overdue for an overhaul.

How to remove words from the Word dictionary

Why Word’s Alphabetical order is different from a dictionary
Star Wars in the Office dictionary
The mystery grammar mistake that Microsoft Word doesn’t always fix
2023 Spelling Bee champs vs Microsoft Word