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For whatever reason, on my Ubuntu install of Firefox, my spellcheck tells me 'flavor' should be 'flavour' and 'initialize' should be 'initialise', etc.. At first, I thought I was crazy and had been spelling it wrong my whole life, but I suddenly realized (ugh there it goes again!) that the spellchecker must be configured for UK English or something. Where can I change this to US English?

Note that I know it is isolated to Firefox, because other applications that have spellcheck on my system are not doing this.

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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In any text box in Firefox, right-click, and you should see a menu item "Languages". Select "English / United States".

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    The problem with this answer is that once you restart the browser, you have to do this again.
    – Ken Kinder
    Commented Jun 21, 2013 at 16:49
  • To prevent it resetting back to en-US (under Windows anyway), you can go into the dictionaries sub-folder within the installation folder and delete the en-US.aff and en-US.dic files. I'm sure there is probably something similar for Linux.
    – Richard
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 16:40
  • This only changes it for the page you are on. Mine has been defaulting to UK English since I installed the dictionary, I would like it to default to US and only be changed to UK on certain pages.
    – endolith
    Commented Nov 12, 2021 at 2:43
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Get any language you like at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/language-tools/ and then disable every language you don't like through menu Tools, Add-ons.

Or, if you want to have multiple languages installed: after installing them, right click in any text box and choose sub menu Languages to select your favorite/favourite.

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    I've had the same issue on Ubuntu and disabling languages through the Add-ons dialog hadn't worked.
    – Firefeather
    Commented Nov 20, 2010 at 5:06
  • @Firefeather, some OS built-in spell check maybe? (On my Mac, the spell checking in Safari is using the built-in spell check, but in Firefox I still need to add language as an add-on.)
    – Arjan
    Commented Nov 20, 2010 at 8:02
  • sorry, let me be more clear. On Ubuntu, Firefox still uses its own spelling dictionary, but even disabling the installed-by-default en-GB language add-on doesn't work. But the text box right-click approach does solve the problem as long as there is a dictionary installed with en-US spellings.
    – Firefeather
    Commented Nov 20, 2010 at 18:51
  • "right click in any text box and choose sub menu Languages to select your favorite/favourite." This doesn't last, though. It still defaults to the wrong one and I have to do this on every page.
    – endolith
    Commented Nov 12, 2021 at 2:44
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Just setting the language doesn't appear to solve the issue. Firefox seems to randomly use any one of the installed dictionaries every time it starts. Several English dictionaries get installed by default in Ubuntu. The solution is to remove all but the US English dictionary using apt-get.

From How can I change Firefox's default dictionary?, Insperatus posted this useful command:

sudo apt-get remove myspell-en-au myspell-en-gb myspell-en-za hunspell-en-ca && sudo apt-get install myspell-en-us

Before:

firefox spelling language before removal

After:

firefox spelling language after removal

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