Dictionaries
There are monolingual and bilingual dictionaries for a remarkable number of languages available on the Web or as Free Software. You are invited to create one for your language, or to contribute to an existing project. Also thesauri, dictionaries of specialized terms (medicine, Net Jargon, etc.). Dictionaries for Input methods, text-to-speech and speech recognition are not listed here. There are also tools for creating dictionaries of various kinds to use with various software, including vocabulary drill for language study.
StarDict and viewers
We are using StarDict as our default dictionary viewer. It is fine for displaying a language with definitions, or two languages with translations. It is not yet good at displaying many languages at once in a space-efficient way. (The desired use is a database with 40 languages, and 40^2 views of source-target language with words in the source and definitions in the target... with each words and definition appearing exactly once in each language.)
Bundled dictionaries
dicts.info has a bundled dictionary developed by Zdenek Broz, in Ar/En/Es/Fr/Pt/Ro/Ru . It has definitions in English from Princeton's WordNet; but not all are appropriate for children. It has pictures from the dicts.info picture dictionary, which are all free, but without source... we are looking for well-sourced free images to replace these.
Other dictionaries online
Web
- [Wiktionary]
- Yahoo list of online dictionaries by language
- OmegaWiki
- Kalyanaraman dictionary/semantic concordance of 90+ languages
Free Software using dictionraies
This list is meant to indicate the range of software available. It is in no way complete.
Typing
Aneto O. was working on a typewriter activity that never quite made a fully functional activity bundle. Some new work is starting in this area, as of December 2007.
Spelling
- Debian Junior Writing (editors and spelling checker)
- aspell about 40 languages
- ispell about 35 languages
- myspell about 40 languages
Dictionary servers
- dict more than 50 languages
- Serpento dict server with full Unicode support
Other
- dict-moby-thesaurus Moby Thesaurus
- dict-bouvier English legal dictionary for US
- dict-foldoc Free OnLine dictionary of computing terms
- dict-vera Computer acronyms
- The On-Line Hacker Jargon File, version 4.4.4
- leksbot Botany and biology
- rhyme
Chinese / Kanji characters
- giten Japanese Kanji dictionary
- kanjidic Japanese Kanji dictionary
- kiten Japanese Kanji dictionary
- hanzim Chinese dictionary
- pydict English/Chinese dictionary
- stardict English/Chinese dictionary
