Add dictionaries to your Mac’s Dictionary app, and more cunning linguist tips
Here’s everything you need to know about how to add extra dictionaries to the OS X Dictionary.app, set up your preferred dictionary within the preferences, use Dictionary from Spotlight, and get a super-fast translation or definition from right within Safari, Pages, Mail, and other native Mac apps.
Before you check out the video screencast, just think of a dictionary or thesaurus that you’d like to have added to your Mac’s Dictionary, and then Google around to hopefully find a free or open-source version of a Leopard-compatible dictionary. It would need to be a folder with the file-name “.dictionary”. Note that this manual method works only with Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6). Or the third-party dictionary might come as an installer package (”.mpkg” file), which helpfully puts the new dictionary in the right place within ‘Dictionary’.
Once you’ve got the dictionary you want downloaded (see below for some links to get you started), you’re ready to see the screencast on how to add it, and get the very most from Dictionary.app on your Mac:
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.Additionally, here are some useful links (to free resources) to get you started in your search for an extra dictionary:
A German-to-English dictionary in the form of a plug-in, based on dict.cc site’s dictionary.
A medical terminology dictionary in the form of a “.dictionary” folder.
The OpenThesaurus German Dictionary plugin.
The BeoLingus German-to-English dictionary plugin
The CEDICT Chinese-to-English dictionary which is based on the open-source CEDICT project, which is occasionally updated. This is version 1.2.
The very large English-to-Chinese dictionary pack which contains four dictionaries (three of which are Traditional Chinese; one of which uses ‘Simplified’ characters).
An English-to-Arabic dictionary plugin.
There are more free and shareware dictionaries for Dictionary.app online.
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Great screencast Steven – thanks for the tip! Any idea if there is Spotlight integration with Firefox?
That useful & cute dictionary pop-up doesn’t support Firefox, unfortunately. But it will work with Google’s Chrome browser (which will be a ‘native’ Mac app) when it appears towards the end of this year.
You could, for FF, try this add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1171). It uses its own dictionary, though. Also, I suspect you want bilingual translation, which that add-on doesn’t do. It’s halfway there tho!
[...] using the Japanese-English dictionary most often (I certainly need it…), but some of you more cunning linguists out there might want to add some other dictionaries as [...]
There’s a firefox extension which lets you use dictionary.app
http://www.micheldalal.com/sw/ff/dic/index.html
Oooh, and I also just found this useful (although a little out of date) post on adding more dictionaries using the DictUnifier app and StarDict dictionaries. I now have French-English and English-French which was the whole point of this exercise.
http://davidtse916.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/adding-dictionaries-to-the-built-in-dictionary-application-in-leopard/