Free Medical Spellcheck Dictionary

Unfortunately a lot of the spellchecker programs cost a good bit of money. So I went on a search for a free program and found exactly what I needed at MT Herald. And along with the program, a great article with download instructions!

Read below...

Without a medical spellcheck program installed, it is irritating to transcribe with MS Word with those red underscores all over the document. You get frustrated adding such underlined words every time to the inbuilt custom dictionary of Microsoft Word by right clicking and adding. To avoid such repeated annoyance, the more permanent solution would be installing a medical spellchecker itself which works in the background.

So for the last one month I have been scouring the net for any available, free, self installable, medical spellchecker software for Microsoft Word to try with my laptop (Windows Vista and MS Word 2003) or, why not, even for my desktop (Windows XP and MS Word 2003), after all it’s going to be free!

With radiology transcription, you don’t encounter complex new medical words daily, you’ll have stereotype reports that can be done without a spellchecker. So I didn’t go for a medical spell checker for my desktop all this time.

However, with my current endeavor of extensive search on the Internet, I couldn’t end up with any such free, medical spelling check software compatible with MS Word. All those that I could find all over the internet were paid ones, or shareware that would work for one month or so and then expire.

The only other option left behind was to prepare a custom dictionary for medical transcription with a collection of medical words in US English that could work in tandem with Microsoft Word. A free custom medical spell checker for medical transcription in US English by a medical transcriptionist! The idea was successful.

I was able to gather two medical terms lists, one from Open Source Medical Spelling Word List having around 50,000 words with terms updated until 2007 and another medical word collection from BestPracticeTransfer.com (That site is down since then!). So along with the words from my own custom dictionary and around ten lists of latest medical terms that were published on MT Herald and the aforesaid two spelling lists, the number of words worked out close to 100,000 after filtering out duplicate entries.

New words come into prevalence in the field of medicine on a daily basis. Hence all the words may not have found their way into this medical glossary especially all those trade names and the names of all those complex surgical instruments. If you have any list of such recent medical terms or surgical equipment glossary, mail me to add them in the future versions.

Now for the installation instructions of our custom medical dictionary.

• Download MTH-Med-Spel-Chek to your desktop.


• Unzip the inside content MTH-MedSpelChek.dic to your desktop.


• Copy this dictionary file to the folder where CUSTOM.DIC resides in your system. In my desktop (Windows XP), I found it at C:/Documents and Settings/intel/Application/Microsoft/Proof. In my laptop (Windows Vista), it is at C:/Users/Raj/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Proof. So, check where the folder “Proof” is in your system and transfer MTH-MedSpelChek.dic to that folder.

  If the folder “Proof” is not showing up, it might have got hidden as system folder. In that case, go to Tools/Folder Options/View. Click “Show hidden files and folders.”
  

• Now open MS Word. Go to Tools/Options/Spelling & Grammar/Custom Dictionaries.Check the slot MTHMedSpelChek.dic. Click OK.

This screenshot shows which boxes under Spelling need to be checked and unchecked. Make sure the box before “Suggest from main dictionary only” and “Hide spelling errors in this document” are unchecked. Click OK.

That’s it! Voila, enjoy working with the free medical spell checker.

For the original article plus a lot more extremely helpful tips for MS Word, please visit Raj's site at MTHerald.com.

Return Home from Medical Spellchecker