I have a user who edits technical materials. She uses MS Word's Custom Dictionary all the time for spelling; it has grown very large, and is now making spell check very slow.

All of the advice I've read online says to disable the custom dictionary. This is an easy solution, but is not workable for the user, because she actually needs this dictionary.

So, is there any way to optimize the custom dictionary and/or Word itself, so that a large dictionary file doesn't slow things down quite so badly?

Many thanks.

Update after suggestions:

I ran contig on the file, and it reports just 1 frag, so that's not the issue I think.

The file is 9.95KB -- 1,117 lines, each consisting of just a single word. I viewed the file using Notepad and none of the lines seems corrupted, strange, or overly long (no line seems to be over 10 chars or so).

Both of your suggestions were helpful so I will upvote both; any further tips would be most welcome.