Adding New Dictionaries To Your Mac 6
Tutorial
Hey
A couple of days ago I had a quick post about changing Dictionaries Labels, this post is going to be a follow on explaining how you can add new dictionaries to your Mac. Its quite useful if you want a language that isn’t supported by Dictionary. The only problem with this tutorial is that it is a little long and the results aren’t perfect. However it is free to use and gives you a new basic dictionary.
The first step is to download a dictionary file. The best way to find them is through StarDict. This sites holds a lot of dictionary files. Find the one you want and download the .tar.bz2 file. This is known as a tarball on the site. You can find numerous dictionaries from the list and the headings at the top of the page. The dictionaries vary in quality and words, you may need to try out a couple of different ones before you find one you like.
At this point the file is in the incorrect format. You need to convert it so Dictionary can read it. Download a small app called DictUnifier. Simply choose the file you have downloaded and press convert. After a couple of minutes the file will be converted and loaded into the Dictionary app. You now have a new dictionary file that you can use.
The new dictionary file can be used right away. The quality of the dictionary files varies depending on the original source, most of them are pretty good. If you do want a professional dictionary it may be useful to buy a dedicated one which has more words and features. However for free, its pretty good.
Where To Next?
6 Responses to “Adding New Dictionaries To Your Mac”
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I must be missing something…
DictUnifier will not open the tar.bz file, the untarred folder, or any of the extracted files!
Sounds neat, but…Comment By mdbookworm on July 22nd, at 5:48 pm
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You have to open the tar.bz2 file. Works on my Mac.
Comment By admin on July 22nd, at 6:02 pm
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Nice tutorial! But it’d be even nicer if you could explain adding dictionaries to OmniDictionary as well.
It’s a small leightweight app developed by OmniGroup and looks pretty nice, but I have no idea how to use it at all (and no useful help can be found at the Internet).
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidictionary/Comment By Phil on July 24th, at 6:50 pm
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Great post. I’d long wondered about / wished for some extensibility for Dictionary.app. What I am still wishing for is some dictionaries for Spanish and French, that I can access through Apple Dictionary—be they translation dictionaries or, better yet, conventional dictionaries (i.e. with definitions etc.) I didn’t really see anything like that on the suggested website.
Any suggestions, anyone?
Comment By Josh on August 11th, at 6:13 am
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Also, I have to wonder whether other web-based dictionaries can be added, and then accessed (in the same way that Wikipedia is incorporated into the app by default.)
Comment By Josh on August 11th, at 6:31 am
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This also isn’t working on my computer… I’ve tried it for a few of the files from StarDict and the DictUnifier seems to be working but once it’s finished there’s no new dictionary to be found anywhere. Is there another essential step that’s missing? Is the New version of DictUnifier(the simply “drag a file” version) different somehow?
Comment By SteverChineser on September 29th, at 7:08 am