Dictionary symbols and abbreviations

AiKe

Member
Sometimes there's an asterix by a word, or certain abbreviations are used in definitions. At times their meanings are intuitive, but at other times I can't figure them out. Is there somewhere on plecodict or on the web or anywhere else that has a key to abbreviations and symbols used in the Oxford or ABC dictionaries?
 

johnh113

榜眼
Dear AiKe,

If all you need is what the abbreviation stands for, without an explanation, then you can get that from the "Help" menu. Just choose "ABC Abbreviations" or "Oxford C-E Abbreviations" or whatever dictionary you're interested in under "Topics" in the "Help" menu.

John
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sadly no, we discussed it with them but were unable to come to what we considered reasonable licensing terms. Honestly, I don't think it would have added much to PlecoDict anyway. This new title isn't nearly as large as the ABC dictionary we sell now; it only has something like 20,000 entries in each half, which means it wouldn't address the biggest issue users have with our current English-to-Chinese offerings (namely, size). And it wouldn't do anything for us on the Chinese-to-English end, since its C-E half is just a pared-down version of the ABC Comprehensive we already sell. Plus, with 2.0 we're adding a fast indexed full-text search feature, so you'll be able to search the Chinese-to-English ABC's definitions for English words almost as quickly as you can search our current English-to-Chinese offerings.
 

AiKe

Member
Help menu doesn't have "Topics"

Back to the abbreviation question here for a second...
Johnh113 - my PlecoDict help menu just has "Ordering..." and "About PlecoDict" on it. How do I get "Topics" on there?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The Pocket PC version doesn't have a Help screen at the moment, unfortunately (for a number of complicated and very silly reasons), so your best bet would be to install Acrobat Reader or another PDF viewer on your Pocket PC and get the abbreviations from the regular instruction manual.
 

pishu

Member
I also want a more thorough explanation of ABC's abbreviations and symbols, but the URL listed above for the ABC Dictionary Notation Guide no longer exists. Is there anywhere else I can obtain the Notation Guide?

Also, is there a similar guide available for the Oxford C-E and E-C dictionaries? Thanks!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That guide should be included with 2.0, but I'm not sure where you could obtain it now - I think it's built into the online help for Wenlin so you could try downloading the demo of that and see if that helps.

The Oxford dictionaries don't include any explanations of what abbreviations mean beyond what's shown in the Pleco help screen, so there's not much we can do for those.
 
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