Where are the system spellchecking dictionaries?

Question

I would like to use the spellchecking dictionaries bundled with OS X from the command line (hunspell), but can't seem to find them. In /System/Library/Spelling there are only 2 files pl_PL.{aff,dic}, and find / -name '*.dic' revealed nothing.

I know I can dowload dictionaries from OpenOffice etc., but I'd like to find the ones bundled with OS X.

EDIT To clarify, there are at least two kinds of dictionaries in OS X:

• Definitions used in Dictionary.app. I'm not interested in those.
• Word lists used by the system spellchecker (red dotted lines). I know OS X uses hunspell because the hunspell website says so, and there are numerous posts on how to add new ones (1, 2). Just, I don't want to add new ones but use the English one that obviously comes with the system.

Answer 1

The spelling dictionaries you are interested in appear to be located in the following location (checked on 10.8.4 and 10.6.8):

/System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources/

The word lists are stored in this directory by language, so U.S. English is in the English.lproj folder.

However, these files are stored in a binary format that I haven't deciphered yet...

Answer 2

Under macOS Catalina...

There are two locations:

• /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources/AppleSpell.8
• /Users/${HOME}/Library/Dictionaries/

The first is the system spell check dictionary and the second is the user dictionary that is created/modified when the user adds a learned word. The second one can be edited using any standard text editor.