Introducing cyber.dic

A spellcheck dictionary built from the word list of our Cybersecurity Style Guide.
Download it on GitHub now.

Default spellcheck dictionaries do not include the niche technical terms that most security professionals need to use in their emails, reports, and presentations. Cyber.dic solves that problem by augmenting your word processor’s dictionary with more than 1,700 terms that are likely to be treated with a red underline in your documents.

The list covers names of programming languages, acronyms, attack names, file types, industry-specific products, well-known companies, and the tricky compounds that default spellcheck dictionaries sometimes label as incorrect. We have carefully filtered this list from the Cybersecurity Style Guide, leaving out terms that we do not recommend using in formal reports.

Cyber.dic currently supports Microsoft Word (for Windows and macOS) and LibreOffice Writer (all versions). The word list is periodically updated to reflect new terms in the ever-changing landscape of technology and security. We will release a major update that accompanies each new version of the Style Guide.

Wherever it’s supported, we have also included an exclusion file of “bad” terms that should be marked wrong by spellcheck. Most of the terms in the exclusion file are misspellings of names (e.g., Wi-Fi instead of Wifi) or words that we have chosen to style with a space that are sometimes spelled without it (end user instead of enduser). The list also includes troublesome terms that are easily confused with technical ones (public vs. pubic or breach vs, breech). These exclusion files work with the cyber.dic to help you standardize writing within your documents and throughout your organization.

If you come across a word that you think should be added to the dictionary for everyone, email [email protected] and we may add it in a future update. You can also fork your own version of cyber.dic and augment it if you deal with specialized vocabulary not covered in our list.