Upgrade of Dictionaries

While learning and using a second language, we must need a dictionary for reference.  From long long time ago, we created various of different language dictionaries, and they have great improvement due to the development of the technology

Students learning English should know very well these dictionaries: Cambridge English Dictionary, Longman Dictionary, and Merriam Websters Dictionary.  These dictionaries, in my opinion, are two heavy to be carried, and too difficult to be used when looking for a word. It usually takes around at least three minutes to find a word, and if eyesight is not so good (like mine), it should be really  a hard job to lookup a word. There's story about it.

My girl friend took a Business English Course, and the lecturer was an aged American. This man didn't teach much, but writing a resume in half year, which actually didn't help my GF find a decent job. He actually didn't care much about the content of the resume, but the detailed things, like the placement of a comma or stop. He liked showing his dictionaries very much, and carried it to the lecture every time. It was a very thick brick, weighting at least 5 kilometers. Even more, its font was so small that it was attached a magnifier. It takes around at least ten minutes to find a word in the dictionary, and you know, a lecture had only around 40 mins, so only four keywords could be found in a lecture.

In my students life,  a new dictionary named e-dictionary machine was popular among students, which was firstly made in Taiwan. The most famous  one then was  "wen qu xing （文曲星）", and now a more popular one is "Nuo YaZhou (诺亚舟)". These dictionaries were sold at around 500 to 1000 yuan. The expensive ons usually have lots of dictionaries and even several different languages like English, Japanese and Germany.  It had been very popular before I graduated from the university when computer it was still not very popular. The market of these dictionaries is now so good as before because these machines can only have very simple definitions to the words, or some very Chinese style sentence examples. Due to the poor market, these machines are now  named as Learning Machines, providing lots of  other contents except dictionaries. For example, they stored Chinese Poems, periodic table of (chemical) elements, physics formats, and exam papers. Another most attractive feature is that they have various of games inside.

As the development of computer, dictionaries applications are very popular in China.  Power Word by Kingsoft was extremely popular among students and lots of office workers (specially cross-national enterprises). Power word  is an application used in Windows operating system, and it keeps updated each year. The updates includes more words and the program itself.  It's been sold around 50 yuan, which can be much cheaper than e-dictionary machine as it's only software, not hardware.

Power word contains lots of dictionaries, longman and Cambridge excluded due to copyrights. It also provides Chinese to English lookups, though the performance is quite unacceptable. Lots of mails from Power word users are not quite hard to be followed, and some of English-speakers hate Power Word. It was said that  it even created a word "Crediable " (credible)。 Actually "creadiable" is even more popular than "credible" because of the power users of Power word.

Power word is famous, but it charges much. Another Application Lingoes is free. It has similar functions like Power word, but it has dictionaries files open sourced, that's,users can add dictionaries by themselves just following the format of the program. Cambridge and Longman dictionaries can be found in Lingoes. Users also added lots of other dictionaries. We'll have more introductions to Lingoes in the next post.

Stardict is another application. It's also free and has a  linux version, and it must be the most famous one in the linux word.

Online dictionaries are now very popular because users don't need to install any software or even register an account. A lot of online dictionaries are available now. Answers.com and google definitions must be the most useful and popular ones. They're also my favorites, and  we'll talk more about it soon.


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Samuel Wu