Advanced English-English dictionary

[garysaville]

I've been looking for a decent advanced English dictionary for my Palm. I was wondering if it is possible to use Pleco to load a Cambridge or Oxford dictionary, or is the database proprietary? I downloaded several English dictionaries that are OK, but they are pretty ugly when compared with Pleco

 

[Smoodo]

Try this

Here's a good one called Nexus Super English dictionary.

http://www.pocketsensei.com

I use it and like it. It has some good definitions and a very nice interface.

 

[mikelove]

It's not really possible to load one of those dictionaries, since they're copyrighted and not available as free downloads, but in general our database converter utility MakePlecoDict should be able to handle an English-to-English dictionary just like any other title, so if you found one you liked you could try converting it with that.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

As if you aren't busy enough, I too want to say that I would love to have access to a decent English - English dictionary with Pleco's interface.

Mike, I have tried almost every English - English dictionary and dictionary browser out there for the pocket PC, and none of them have a user friendly interface that is as quick and easy to use and search in as is Pleco.

Darrol

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! Actually I've been playing around with a new WM Smartphone for a few days now and the dictionary situation on there is even more pathetic, so particularly if we end up doing a version of our software for that platform (as we probably will) there'd be an incentive for us to at least consider licensing a decent English-English title. Still behind a bunch of other things on our priority list, though, like a traditional Chinese medical dictionary (making some progress on that one, actually), a character etymology dictionary, a phrasebook or subject-ordered dictionary, a Cantonese dictionary, and a "regular" C-E dictionary with more detailed definitions than the very-concise ones in the Oxford/ABC, but since most of those are proving very difficult to find and an E-E title would likely be extremely easy I suppose that's one big argument in favor of that.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Woo hoo! All of that sounds great, the additional features you are working on and the fact that an English - English dictionary will be relatively easy to license and compile!

加油！

 

[mikelove]

Well that's just a list of Things We'd Like to License, remember; we aren't necessarily going to be able to get all of them, but any of them that we can license, we will. The TCM one we're feeling pretty good about, etymology we had one or two leads but they all seem to have fallen apart (very promising discussion with Zhongwen.com which eventually fizzled), phrasebook is a new (and somewhat Olympics-driven) idea but since there are so many of them (just bought half a dozen different titles to try to figure out who to approach first) I imagine we won't have too much trouble finding one, Cantonese has been extremely frustrating and absent a new title coming on the market the prospects are pretty bleak for that, and for a new C-E there are some ongoing discussions but I honestly don't know how good our odds are of ending up with a license.

But even if we can't find an etymological dictionary, a memory-aid title like the new Remembering the Hanzi might be similarly useful for study, so we could always inquire about licensing one of those. And on Cantonese we could at least explore the possibility of adding some sort of system to automatically generate Cantonese pronunciations for words in our current line of Mandarin-oriented dictionaries; wouldn't be perfect and of course it wouldn't help us with slang or words that are only used in Cantonese-speaking areas but it would be better than nothing at least.