GoldenDict

Updated on Oct 10, 2024

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Developer(s) Konstantin Isakov

Stable release 1.0.1-1 / December 4, 2010; 6 years ago (2010-12-04) Preview release 1.5.0-RC2 (Windows) / May 1, 2016; 9 months ago (2016-05-01) Operating system Windows, Linux/X11, macOS, Android, Maemo Type Dictionary, Translation License GNU General Public License

GoldenDict is an open-source dictionary program that gives translations of words and phrases for different languages. It allows the use of several popular dictionary file formats simultaneously and without conversion.

The project aims to create a feature-rich dictionary search program.

Features

The desktop program is free and open-source software (FOSS).

Supports multiple electronic dictionary file formats, namely:

WordNet – a free lexical database for the English language

XDXF dictionary (XML Dictionary eXchange Format)

Babylon (.bgl) files with images and resources

StarDict (.ifo / .dict / .idx / .syn) dictionaries

Dictd (.index / .dict / .dz) dictionary files

ABBYY Lingvo (.dsl) source files, together with abbreviation files. The files can be optionally compressed with dictzip. Dictionary resources can be packed together into a .zip file

ABBYY Lingvo (.lsa / .dat) audio archives. Those can be indexed separately or referred to from .dsl files

Sdictionary (.dct) dictionaries. This format is also known as sdict.

Aard (.aar) dictionaries

Sound packs (.zips) in zip archives

MDict (.mdx / .mdd) dictionaries

EPWING (.Catalogs) dictionaries

Uses WebKit layout engine for a more accurate article representation (including formatting, colors, images and links)

Supports lookups in Wikipedia, Wiktionary, or any other MediaWiki-based sites

Can use arbitrary websites as dictionaries via templated URL patterns

Can translate long text of many languages (e.g. through Babelfish, by adding this line in GoldenDict: http://fr.babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt?trtext=%GDWORD%&lp=fr_en for translating from French to English)

Hunspell-based morphology system, used for word stemming and spelling suggestions

Can index arbitrary directories with audio files for pronunciation lookups

Can feed look up word to external program and print program output along other dictionary results

Full Unicode case, diacritics, punctuation and whitespace folding. This means the ability to type in words without any accents, correct case, punctuation or spaces (e.g. typing "Grussen" would yield "grüßen" in German dictionaries)

Supports Russian, Greek, German, Belarusian and Japanese transliteration

Native TTS support in Windows and macOS

Scan popup functionality. A small popup window displays the translation of a word chosen from another application

Support for global hotkeys (to activate the program window or translate a word from the clipboard)

Tabbed browsing in a Qt 4 interface

Supports NPAPI web plugins (e.g. Flash Player)

Supports dictionary custom icons

Cross-platform: Linux/X11, macOS, Maemo, Android and Windows + portable to others (Android application is closed-source and is available in Google Play as both paid and free version (which displays advertisements and is limited to 5 dictionaries))

Allows playback of pronunciation sound clips in different languages using Forvo online service

Advantages and shortcomings

Compared to other similar software GoldenDict:

Supports several popular dictionary file formats, whereas Babylon and ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software support only one (native) format, and Stardict supports only two formats.

The program's internal use of the WebKit layout engine allows displaying articles in a format similar to web pages in a web browser, which ABBYY Lingvo, StarDict and Babylon are unable to do.

The current version (1.0.1) cannot perform full-text searches inside articles of a dictionary. However, finding text in the currently displayed article is possible.

The Android version of GoldenDict is not open-source.

References

GoldenDict Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA

Contents

Features

Advantages and shortcomings

References