Lingoes

A few years ago (2004), I wrote about the excellent Merriam Webster Online Dictionary (www.m-w.com) . I still find this online dictionary extremely useful today because besides giving you the definition, you can also click on the speaker icon to hear how each word is pronounced.

Try figuring out how to pronounce these words:

• Cheyenne
• Banyan
• Pyrrhic

and you will see why the pronunciation feature is a godsend.

However, if you are using a notebook computer, you may not have internet access all the time. It would be nice to have access to a dictionary that is installed on your hard disk in such situations. For this, I can heartily recommend this new freeware that I have just found called "Lingoes":

www.lingoes.net

Lingoes is not a dictionary. It is a dictionary engine. After installing the dictionary engine, you need to load the actual dictionary separately. However, it can load MORE THAN ONE dictionary! I loaded mine with the following dictionaries:

1. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
2. Oxford Advanced Learners English Dictionary
3. Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary
4. Collins COBUILD Advanced Learners English Dictionary

The interface is very user friendly. The dictionary interface will display the word definition from all the dictionaries you've loaded. Thus, if you do not understand the explanation provided by one dictionary, you can scroll down to read the explanations given by the other dictionaries to make things clearer. And because I also loaded the "Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary", I can also see the Chinese definition on the same page.

Mind you, the dictionaries available for download are ELITE stuff (from Longman, Oxford, and Collins no less). True, the dictionary publishers supplied only their "Learners edition" dictionaries for free, but that is actually good enough for the average user.

For your info, the Oxford and Collins advanced learners dictionaries only cover about 50,000 words, while the Longman dictionary covers about 100,000 words. That is why many a time, you will find a word defined only in the Longman dictionary, but not in the Oxford or Collins advanced learners dictionaries. Because the Longman dictionary has a larger word set than the others, I arranged for it to be the first dictionary in my results list.

In contrast, my hard copy "Oxford Concise English Dictionary" covers 240,000 words, which is more than double that of the Longman and 4 times that of the advanced learners dictionaries. Obviously Oxford will not provide their premium "Concise English Dictionary" away for free.

The "Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary" has a word set of only 25,000 words. However, for its limited vocabulary, its Chinese definitions are invaluable.

I noticed that the definitions given by the Collins COBUILD dictionary are the easiest to understand. This dictionary is very suitable for primary school children.

Lingoes also has a feature called "Cursor Translation", which allows you to display the dictionary definition of a word in other applications like Word, Excel etc. Just hover the mouse cursor over a word and click the Left Shift key to popup the dictionary definition.

Finally, Lingoes has a LIMITED pronunciation capability. It actually makes use of the built-in speech synthesizer in the Windows XP operating system to pronounce the words. Speech synthesizers do not normally pronounce words correctly. You can compare the pronunciation generated by Lingoes with those recorded in the Merriam Webster website. The difference in quality is very pronounced :-)