Are you a writer? Or a word geek? If you write anything or play word games, dictionaries, thesauruses, and other reference tools can come in handy. We’ve found some useful offline and online tools for looking up words, finding synonym, or building words in Scrabble. Dictionary and thesaurus programs and websites allow us to go beyond the dated, printed dictionary. You can find so much more up-to-date information on the web without having to buy dictionaries and other reference books.
Even if you buy a Mac in France, English and Japanese are the only languages available in Dictionary.app. MacOS X is the same no matter where it is sold and only comes with English and Japanese pre-installed at the present time.
The following programs and websites provide useful reference tools for free. Offline Desktop Software The following software programs are offline programs you download and install on your computer. Some of the downloads may be large because the programs include the full dictionaries with the program for offline use. Ultimate Dictionary is a free dictionary program for Windows that is easy to install and use. It contains a collection of around 61 dictionaries, which includes dictionaries, thesauruses, and glossaries, as well as English, Spanish, French, and Polish word references. When you type a word into the search box Ultimate Dictionary, it looks for it in all the dictionaries it contains at once and provides a meaning from each dictionary in which the word was found in the right pane.
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The results start to display as you type the word with hints provided for matching words. Quickly jump from one information source to another (translations, encyclopedia entries, glossaries) simply by clicking the Jump to Dictionary button and selecting a reference source from the list on the left. WordWeb is a free dictionary program for Windows that provides a dictionary and a thesaurus. Each word is accompanied by synonyms, and where available antonyms (a word having a meaning opposite to that of another word), meronyms (a word that names a part of a larger whole; for example, “finger” is a meronym of “hand”), hypernyms (a word that is more generic than a given word; for example, “car” or “airplane” are hypernyms for more precise terms like Toyota Camry or Boeing 747), holonyms (a word that names the whole of which a given word is a part; for example, “hat” is a holonym for “brim” and “crown”). WordWeb provides a keyboard shortcut that allows you to look up any word anywhere on your computer.
By default, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + Right Click, but this can be changed in the Preferences. WordWeb also has access to online references that include Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and, allowing you to access word definitions on the internet. You can also access a history or your word searches, copy the results of a lookup, and click on any word displayed in WordWeb to display a definition of that word. WordWeb is free, but they have a very unique policy that you must satisfy to continue using the free program. Otherwise, you must purchase, which includes 5000 more definitions and many extra features. TheSage English Dictionary and Thesaurus is a free offline dictionary and thesaurus that contains a large dictionary of more than 210,000 definitions, as well as a complete thesaurus providing over 1,400,000 relationships between definitions, including synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms, meronyms, holonyms, and more.
TheSage has a tabbed interface, allowing you to look up multiple words at the same time. You can also search using wildcards and refer to a history of your searched words.
The program also integrates into the Windows context menus, providing quick access to definitions from almost anywhere on your computer. Other features include access to online references such as Wikipedia and Google (for definitions and translation), an anagram search, real-time search, system tray integration, and the ability to run TheSage from a USB flash drive. LingoPad is a free offline dictionary for Windows that contains a German-English dictionary, as well as other dictionaries that are available for download. You can import your own dictionaries, define your own, and create and edit word lists. The search feature allows you to search for the beginning, ending, or middle part of a word, search for collocations, and view a list of the latest search words. You can also use a hotkey to search for a tagged word or a word from the clipboard. There are direct links to look up words on Wikipedia and various search engines.
NOTE: Currently, LingoPad is only available for Windows, but there will be no further development of LingoPad only for Windows in the near future. However, they are planning to develop a cross-platform version of LingoPad for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Artha Dictionary is a free, cross-platform (Windows and Linux), offline English Thesaurus based on, which is a large, lexical database of English developed at Princeton University. For each word you look up, the possible relatives displayed by Artha include, (related noun/verb), (what a verb entails doing), (what a verb causes to), (is a kind of), (kinds), (is a part of) and (parts). Each of these links takes you to a definition and example of the relative category. When you select a relative in Artha, its corresponding definition is scrolled to and highlighted for easy understanding. Artha starts searching as you start typing, displaying a list of possible matches from what you have typed so far.
If you misspell a search word, Artha provides near-match suggestions. Once you launch Artha, it sits in the system tray. You can look up words from any open window by selecting the text and pressing a pre-set hotkey. When using the hotkey, you can choose to have Artha show a passive notification, or balloon tip, so you can quickly continue what you were doing.
Artha maintains a history of all your search terms and provides Previous and Next buttons so you can easily browse through your searches. Aard Dictionary is a free offline dictionary and thesaurus program that allows you to look up meanings for difficult words using multiple dictionaries in multiple languages. You can add more than 50 different to its database. Some of its features include on-the-fly searching and filtering capabilities, the ability to view a history or recent searches, the ability to zoom in and out of contents, and fast word lookups. For words found on Wikipedia using Aard Dictionary, the full article is displayed and you can save the Wikipedia article as an HTML document on your local hard disk.
Aard Dictionary also provides many keyboard shortcuts for those of you who prefer using the keyboard over the mouse for navigation. GoldenDict is a free, feature-rich offline dictionary program for Windows and Linux. It supports multiple dictionary formats, such as Babylon, StarDict,. You can also look up words on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, or any other MediaWiki-based websites using GoldenDict. It also supports looking up and listening to pronunciations using the pronunciation guide,. You can lookup words selected in other applications or translate a word from the clipboard using hotkeys. Lingoes is a free, easy-to-use dictionary and text translation program that offers lookup dictionaries, full text translation and pronunciation of words in over 80 languages.
You can also select text in other programs and windows and use a key combination to have Lingoes to display results for the selected text. Lingoes provides free dictionaries, thesauruses, and encyclopedias for download and allows you to configure them yourself. In addition to using offline dictionaries, you can also use online dictionary services and encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.
Lingoes also includes tools and references, such as a currency converter, international dialing codes, international time zone converter, weights and measures, and more. You can additional tools, information, games, and shortcuts. Mobysaurus Thesaurus is a free, offline, English thesaurus program that contains 30,260 roots and more than 2.5 million synonyms. It suggests results as you type, stores your look up history, and allows you to bookmark your favorite words and phrases. You can also perform a wildcard word search, search online for results, print your results, and copy your results to the clipboard. Mobysaurus Thesaurus is freeware, but they ask you to. It doesn’t cost anything.
Register on their forum to receive a license key that is good for six months. After that, you need to go back to their site to get a new license key for another six months. One year after your initial signup, you can go back to the site and get a permanent, non-expiring license key.
Mobysaurus Thesaurus requires at least.NET Framework 2.0 to run. NOTE: You can also download Mobysaurus Thesaurus from, but you still need to register on DonationCoder.com’s site for a license key.
CleverKeys is a free tool that allows you to access definitions at, synonyms at, facts at, and more from just about any Windows or Mac OS X program, such word processors, web browsers, and email programs. Some features of CleverKeys include the ability to add your own URLs, highly configurable hotkeys, and the ability to open CleverKeys results in a new window. CleverKeys works with most current web browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. Online The following websites provide online dictionaries and other reference material. Dictionary.com is a free, online dictionary that is part of the website (with, as well) and is an interactive and reliable source for word meaning and usage. With 50 million users around the world accessing the site every month, It’s the largest and most authoritative free online dictionary and mobile reference resource. Dictionary.com can also be used on mobile platforms, including Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Nook, and Kindle Fire.
TheFreeDictionary.com is the world’s most comprehensive, free, online dictionary with dictionaries available in many languages and other types of dictionaries available, such as, and dictionaries. It’s also contains a, a, and a search engine. You can also make The Free Dictionary your own home page and customize it by adding and removing, dragging and dropping, and “using or losing” existing content windows. You can also add your own bookmarks, weather information, horoscope, and RSS feeds from anywhere on the internet.
You can access definitions on The Free Dictionary from almost any application on your PC by installing the free. Then, simply highlight a word, press Alt and left click your mouse, and the definition displays. You can also in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari that make access to The Free Dictionary quick and easy from almost any other webpage. Wiktionary is a free, multilingual dictionary that is the lexical companion to.
It includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics and extensive appendices, as well as extra, clarifying information in the definitions, such as, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations. Wiktionary is a wiki, so you can edit it. However, before you contribute, be sure to read through some of the Help pages, as Wiktionary does things differently than other wikis and they have some strict criteria. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary The is a free dictionary based on the print version of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. The online dictionary includes the main A-Z listing of the Collegiate Dictionary, as well as the Abbreviations, Foreign Words and Phrases, Biographical Names, and Geographical Names sections of that book.
Oxford Dictionaries Online is a free website that offers a comprehensive, current English dictionary, information to help you, and a. It also contains up-to date bilingual dictionaries in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. They also offer a premium site, Oxford Dictionaries Pro (£42 per year), which features more than 350,000 definitions, 600,000 synonyms and antonyms, and over 1.9 million usage examples, all linked intelligently and seamlessly, audio pronunciations, example sentences, advanced search functionality, a puzzle solver section, and specialist language resources for writers and editors. Collins Dictionary The official online contains over 1 million entries, and provides free access to word definitions, translations, and examples. There is also a section where you can play, such as crossword puzzles and cryptic crossword puzzles, use their Scrabble Checker, and learn from their top 10 Crossword Tips and top 10 scrabble tips. They also provide a widget that allows you to place the Collins English Dictionary, French Dictionary, Spanish Dictionary, German Dictionary or Italian Dictionary on your website or blog. Word-Net Online is a free, English dictionary and thesaurus that offers definitions, synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, holonyms, derived forms and sample sentences.
They also offer a for your Windows desktop. Install the program and search for any word or term on WordNet-Online directly from your desktop. OneLook is a free dictionary site that can be thought of as a search engine for words and phrases. When you look up a word on OneLook, you are directed to the web-based dictionaries that define or translate that word. The OneLook search engine indexes more than five million words in more than 1000 online dictionaries. You can also use OneLook to find a word when you only have part of it, similar to a crossword dictionary.
Enter a pattern using letters and the. and? To display a list of words matching your pattern. If you enter a word and select Find translations, OneLook displays a list of dictionary websites that have translations of that word into other languages. OneLook can be customized to the way you work, as well. OneLook also has an interesting feature called a.
This allows you to describe a concept and receive a list of words and phrases related to that concept. You can enter a few words, a sentence, a question, or even one word. The best results are obtained if you keep the entered phrase short and the best matches are shown first in the list of results. Urban Dictionary is a web-based dictionary of slang words and phrases written and rated by site visitors (voted thumbs “up” or “down”) and regulated by volunteer editors. As of September 6, 2012, it contained 6,743,306 definitions. Visitors to Urban Dictionary may submit definitions without registering, but they must provide a valid email address. All new definitions must be approved by the editors.
Once approved, entries become the property of Urban Dictionary. The definitions on Urban Dictionary are meant to be slang or ethnic culture words, phrases, and other terms not found in standard dictionaries. Most words have multiple definitions and include usage examples. MetaGlossary.com is a comprehensive, highly organized dictionary and glossary. It’s the world’s largest, constantly-updated repository of information, harvesting definitions from the entire web. MetaGlossary precisely extracts the meanings of the terms and phrases it finds on the web and provides you with concise, direct explanations for the terms and phrases. The meanings are also organized based on topic and usage.
Specialty Dictionary Programs and Websites In our search for useful offline and online dictionaries, thesauruses, and other reference tools, we also came across some dictionary programs and websites that serve special purposes, such as a dictionary only defining computer terms, a crossword dictionary, and a few Scrabble dictionaries and word finders. Smadi Computer Dictionary The is reference tool with a very simple interface, in which you can find over 86,000 computer and technology related acronyms and their definitions. Crossinary is a dictionary program for Windows that helps you create and solve crosswords and other word puzzles. It contains over a quarter of a million English words (including some proper nouns) and allows you to quickly search the massive list to find all the words that match a pattern, such as g-something-something-k.
Free Scrabble Dictionary The is a free tool to help you look up definitions and find words to use when playing Scrabble. They have tens of thousands of words and a half a million definitions. You can also use the Free Scrabble Dictionary to play other word games, such as Words with Friends, Scramble with Friends, and Hanging with Friends. You can also use the and the websites to help you play word games, such as Scrabble®, Lexulous, Wordscraper, Scrabulous, Anagrammer, Literati, Text Twist, Jumble Words and Words with Friends.
If you’ve found any useful dictionary, thesaurus, or reference resources or other dictionaries and tools for playing word games, that are not on this list, let us know.
The built-in Dictionary app in macOS is hardly the sexiest piece of software out there, but it is a crucially overlooked resource. When combined with the context menu’s “Look Up” function, it makes both learning words and using words correctly far easier. And for folks learning another language, it’s crucial to getting translations right. It’s already on your Mac: you just need to use it.
Using Dictionary The easiest way to access the information stored in Dictionary is through a right-click. Select a word, then right-click on it. You’ll see Look up word as a context menu option. Select that, and a contextual popup will appear over the highlighted word, over a definition or even a preview of the associated Wikipedia page. The dictionary is slightly limited compared to something like the Oxford English Dictionary, but it includes a large enough selection to get things done in common English. You can also open the Dictionary app from /Applications/Dictionary.app or through Spotlight. From there, you can search any dictionary specifically and access the thesaurus, perhaps the least-understood and most poorly used tool for writers of all skill levels.
Quick tip for proper thesaurus use: remember that synonyms in a thesaurus are not perfect replacements. You still need to know the definition and connotation of the word before dropping it into your writing. Adding Dictionaries to the Dictionary App Dictionaries can be added from the library of available dictionaries. There are dictionaries for every language supported by macOS, as well as a number of additional English dictionaries that are useful to writers and students. Open the Dictionary app’s preferences ( Dictionary Preferences in the menu bar or Command + ' on your keyboard.) This reveals a large list of all the available dictionaries within the application Select the dictionaries you want to appear by checking the boxes next to their names. Dictionaries are arranged alphabetically based on their language.
At the bottom, you’ll find a few additional English dictionaries and thesauri, which can be quite useful to students and writers. Changing Dictionary Names Many of the dictionaries have unhelpfully short titles. By renaming dictionaries, we can see the relevant information about all the installed dictionaries at once. To rename a dictionary, right-click on the dictionary in the toolbar and choose Edit Label from the context menu. Type the dictionary’s new name in the text box and click “OK” to apply the change. Importing Custom Dictionaries Theoretically, custom dictionaries can be imported in the Dictionary app.
If you can find one. Many of the websites that hosted custom dictionaries are now defunct. Dictionary files are stored in /Library/Dictionaries which can be accessed directly from Finder or by choosing File Open Dictionaries Folder in the Dictionary app.
Once you’ve found a dictionary in the.dictionary format, you can place it in that folder. The Dictionary app will automatically load it the next time it’s opened. There are not many active websites that offer dictionary files for download, unfortunately. The major ones, like StarDict, have closed up shop for one reason or another. As of writing, clasqm for multiple foreign languages available for download on his website. Conclusion: Creating Dictionaries There are also to the Apple format using pyglossary.
It’s a complex process, but it is functional. If you don’t experience or, you might want to read up on those before you begin.
With pyglossary, you can convert Babylon (BGL) dictionaries to.dictionary files. The good news is that there’s an abundance of Babylon dictionaries, from linguistic to technical. We were able to make the conversion process successfully, so we can confirm this method is functional as the time of writing.
We can also confirm that a once commonly-used tool for this process, DictUnifier, does not function in modern versions of macOS. It will open, but that’s it. A third-party program, can add many multilingual spellchecking dictionaries to Dictionary.app. It is paid software, but it’s less than $10 for a license. If you’re frequently working with multiple languages, it’s likely the best dictionary tool for the job.
It also natively supports more languages than Dictionary.app and provides spellchecking in non-English languages. It can’t support external dictionaries, but. If you’re interested in exploring lesser-known macOS apps, you may also like the following posts.