nisus.com

Where is the user dictionary file?
What format is it in?
Can it be edited by hand?

It would be useful to me to both see the file and edit it if possible.

I found the answer to my own question, and thought I would post it for general informaion.

The user dictionary files are in ~/Library/Spelling/.

There is one file per language. The names of the files are the two-character language code ("en" for english, "de" for deutsch, etc.)

The files are 16-bit unicode. A null character (hex 00 00) is used as the terminator of a word; words are stored in the order they were added.

I haven't tried yet, but with such a simple format there doesn't look like any reason why it couldn't be edited if your editor can handle 16-bit unicode and lets you view and enter null characters.

It would be very useful to be able to manipulate the user dictionary via NWP. Once a year I add a word which is misspelled and want to get it out after noticing that i erronious added it.

thf wrote: It would be very useful to be able to manipulate the user dictionary via NWP.

You can edit it manually using NWE/NWP or another text editor but, when a similar problem was discussed on the Dartmouth list, Hamid recommended a free prefpane called Dictionary Cleaner.
http://www.twoamsoftware.com/?q=dc/about

The way user dictionary words are stored in your Library/Spelling folder has changed on Snow Leopard (also on Leopard?): words are now separated by New Line; previously they were separated by a control character (U+0000). It seems Dictionary Cleaner still works on systems where words are separated by the control character, but it won't be able to edit and/or save user dictionaries on the current system.