[E050] Can't find model 'en_core_web_sm'. It doesn't seem to be a Python package or a valid path to a data directory.
Author: oliverchan698Created Jul 13, 2026Updated Jul 13, 2026
I keep getting OSError: [E050] Can't find model 'en_core_web_sm'. It doesn't seem to be a Python package or a valid path to a data directory. every time I try to load any spacy model with spacy.load().
I have already downloaded the model with python3 -m spacy download en_core_web_sm.
Why is this?
How to reproduce the behaviour
import spacy
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
Even just running these two lines of code causes the error.
Your Environment
- spaCy version: 3.8.13
- Platform: macOS-15.7.7-arm64-arm-64bit-Mach-O
- Python version: 3.14.6
Source: explosion/spaCy