I'd like a category search: 'jobs', 'verbs of motion', etc.

Printed dictionaries follow a fixed alphabetic listing order but why isn't electronic dictionary data as malleable as Excel or Access data? With Pleco, I can type in @国 and generate a list of countries using that structure but it excludes the many that don't such as Canada, Australia, etc. What I'd like to see in a future release is the ability to search for a category listing such as 'countries', 'jobs', 'colors', 'businesses', 'verbs of motion', 'modal verbs' or words that are both 'verbs+nouns' which can be further modified by a 'sub-' or 'super-cagtegory' selection. Another useful feature would be the ability to restrict the entries displayed through a 'word frequency' number so only the most common words are displayed.

I suspect this may be a tall order in terms of memory requirements to store all the additional tag information. As far as tagging vocabulary by categories, download Stephen Glasier 's dictionary 'WordMenu' for free and give it a try: WordMenu.com. If anyone's seen a Chinese version of this, I'd love to hear from you.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Actually the memory requirement would be fairly modest, it's mainly the question of adding a new index, adding a new search interface for that index, etc... at some point we're going to run out of space to put all of these extra settings. But definitely a useful feature so if we can find a way to add it eventually we will.
 
Hey Mike,

Seems to me like it would create a lot of extra work on your part to create the tags for each category, but I must agree with LongShiKong as I too really like the idea of being able to browse through the dictionary by using categories. Not only to categories efficiently narrow the search results, but they also let you easily and efficiently veiw other words that are very relevant to the topic.
 
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