So I looked around a bit more today. I found that you can download the dictionaries from Sun, in particular you can find the US English dictionary at :
http://extensions.services.openoffic...ect/en_US-dict
And there are a few ways that one can install it. However, if you installed openoffice 3 on FreeBSD you will likely get an error trying to install it, something like
A little more searching on that leads to a discussion hosted at freebsd.org:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=127946
Which in my case seems to be bad news. I, like many others, installed openoffice using a package from good-day.net. And of course we don't ordinarily make a habit of compiling packages (that would make them ports, wouldn't it?). However someone did find where the bug is that makes it impossible to install dictionaries in openoffice3 in FreeBSD 7 or above; and they released a patch for it.