Dictionary Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Teach your iPhone to swear, take two

by Aron Trimble (Jan 21st, 2009)

Erica Sadun has written an article over at Ars all about teaching your touchable pocket pal some nasty habits. If your language is generally more "explicit," or you just have a need for the iPhone (or iPod Touch) to learn someone's last name, then take heart, ye weary iPhone typists! We previously ...

Your iPhone and salty language

by Dave Caolo (Dec 7th, 2008)

Some of you may have noticed that your iPhone or iPod touch is a bit prudish. Type a salty word and you'll likely be presented with a benign and completely inappropriate alternative (see screenshot at right). The problem (if you want to call it that) isn't that one can't swear, but that ...

How knswledgable are you about cartgriqdges?

by Robert Palmer (Nov 5th, 2008)

Newer updates to Mac OS X Leopard seem to have an interesting problem with their spelling databases: they include words that are most certainly wrong. The problem first appeared in 10.5.2 (U.S. English), and has not yet been corrected. Canspice.org points to an Ars Technica discussion from March ...

Noah Webster's ghost happily haunting your iPhone

by Steven Sande (Oct 22nd, 2008)

With the availability of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, for the iPhone and iPod touch, Noah Webster must be a happy ghost. His namesake dictionary, converted to Apple's handheld platforms by Paragon Technologie GmbH, now gives teachers, writers, and students a fully ...

Mac 101: Search Wikipedia from your desktop

by Cory Bohon (Sep 9th, 2008)

When Apple made the move from Tiger to Leopard, they decided to throw in more than a few features. One of those new features was the ability to search Wikipedia right from Dictionary. To start searching Wikipedia, just open Dictionary (located in /Applications). Next, click on the Wikipedia ...

Mac 101: spell check errors

by Dave Caolo (Jul 10th, 2008)

There's a funny post at The Apple Blog today that points out a few typos that give Mac OS X Leopard's built-in spell checker a bit of trouble. For instance, the error "instrucitons" suggests "isntrucitons" as well as "instructions", and "applicaticataion" when "applicatication" is typed instead of ...

Free iPhone Keyboard Dictionaries

by Erica Sadun (Apr 22nd, 2008)

If you regularly type on your iPhone with a non-supported language such as Danish, Dutch, Finnish or Portuguese, you'll be pleased to learn about iPhoneDict, a repository of free keyboard dictionaries. The solution is a bit of a hack. After downloading, you have to add the dictionary into the ...

�bersetzen Sie das, bitte (Translate this, please)

by Brett Terpstra (Mar 18th, 2008)

For German users and English-speaking users with German-language needs, Philipp Brauner has made available the dict.cc Dictionary Plugin for Leopard, which adds the dict.cc vocabulary compilation to the OS X Dictionary. dict.cc is a community generated and verified English-German dictionary. The ...

Jisho updated again, and discounted for TUAW readers

by Mike Schramm (Dec 6th, 2007)

We've covered Jisho, the Japanese to English dictionary for OS X, a few times in the past, so I'm pretty sure that everyone who wants to translate Japanese to English and reads our site has probably seen it already. But just in case you've been waiting on a decision to buy it, wait no more-- not ...

24 Hours of Leopard: Dictionary

by Scott McNulty (Oct 26th, 2007)

Feature: Dictionary How it works: Find a word you don't know the meaning of, launch the app, find the meaning, and rejoice. But that's not all! The new and improved Dictionary in Leopard defines words, it is true, but it also shows you Wikipedia information about whatever term you searched for. ...

Jisho: Japanese to English translator for the Mac

by Mike Schramm (Sep 18th, 2007)

I've watched as much anime as the next guy, but even I need a Japanese dictionary to figure out what those crazy robots are saying sometimes. Enter Jisho, a Japanese/English dictionary for Mac OS X 10.4 and higher. You can search in the Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana forms of Japanese, and also in ...

Mac OS X Leopard demo videos a'plenty

by David Chartier (Jun 25th, 2007)

As excited as I am for the iPhone, I'm just as excited for Mac OS X Leopard - that's why I have to thank TUAW reader Uros for sending us a link to a big ol' batch of Leopard demo videos posted at Brightcove, a video sharing service. Demoed in the videos are features like Screen Sharing, Cover ...

TranslateIt! Foreign Language Dictionaries

by Mat Lu (Apr 18th, 2007)

File this one under, tons of potential but not there yet. TranslateIt! is an interesting foreign language dictionary application from what appears to be a Russian software company. The application comes in two versions, one shareware and the other free, but it is only the shareware version that ...

HOWTO: Expurgate your Dictionary

by Erica Sadun (Apr 12th, 2007)

OS X's built-in dictionary has naughty words. Who knew? The following gallery will walk you through the steps it takes to censor your dictionary and prevent innocent young 'uns from looking up the proper meanings of these words. You'll need the Property List Editor, which is available as part of ...

TUAW Tip: hold ctrl-cmd-d while mousing for live definitions

by David Chartier (Nov 27th, 2006)

Many of you power users know that pressing ctrl-cmd-d in many Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger applications (except Firefox and a few others) will yield a handy pop-up definition window, drawing information from the standalone Dictionary app that sits in your Applications folder. However, if you didn't know ...