Chinese Dictionary for PC....

[ZhangXinQiang]

I am looking for some Dictionary for PC. Like a software.. That you can run on your computer and look up words when you need it.

[chaxiu]

You could try Wenlin 文林. It's very quick and easy to use. You can us pinyin, radical, number of strokes, components etc... to search for the word/character. It has some other useful features aswell.......

I rarely use a paper/book dictionary anymore.

www.wenlin.com

hope it helps

Chaxiu

[AxelManbow]

Wenlin's functionality is great, except it's usability is equivalent to forcing balloons into a box through a pin hole, inflating one at a time and expecting to be able to see what they all see. Such inserting of balloons is a painful experience.

I'd recommend this for dictionary stuff. Double plus for me... works on Linux.

The Pleco issue is bound to raise it's head. Pleco have a range of great dictionaries and a great piece of software. It's just a shame that they don't open their software to everyone. Java, a common platform which DimSum runs on with little trouble is fast enough. My cheap-ass mobile phone can even install a decent (if slow) dictionary. If pleco provided a good reliable platform with which to interact with various dictionaries I'm sure they'd be even more successful than now. Just look to the US where in Boston alone more than 7000 high school students study Chinese. How many of them have a PDA?

OK, seeming rantish. I use an EEE with DumSum and ZDT. Does me well. Dictionaries pop up here and there.

[Luobot]

For my desktop, I use ZDT. Dictionary, annotation, flashcards, easy to use, open source and free. Works with CEDICT and adso dictionaries.

[mikelove]

A mobile Java version of Pleco would require pretty much rewriting the entire program from scratch, at the conclusion of which we'd have something that had maybe 50% of the non-Java version's functionality and was painfully slow. The main problem is databases - while a few mobile Java platforms like Android and ALP include fast, powerful, non-Java database engines like SQLite, the version of Java built into your average run-of-the-mill mobile phone doesn't, nor does the version of Java that runs on BlackBerries, so pretty much any sort of user-created data like flashcards would be a non-starter and even our built-in dictionaries would be much slower than they are on Palm/PPC.

We are, however, planning to release a native version of Pleco for desktop Windows by the end of 2008, and are also considering Mac/Linux ports - at the very least we'll try to make sure the Windows version runs well enough under Wine to be usable without resorting to dual-booting or VMWare.

[Marceau]

I've been using Lingoes for a while now. I like it better than Kingsoft's Powerword: it's much smaller in installed size, and it's free. It also offers many many dictionaries that you can install and use offline (ranging from English to Dutch and Italian to Vietnamese and Latin and so on). I had some problems with crashes in the beginning, but I think that was because I installed too many dictionaries in the 'index search' after a reinstall and a bit of skimming of the default list, I haven't had a crash yet.

It has a customizable contextual lookup (right now, ctrl-right click will translate any word I click on in any program on my computer, and show results in a nice window. Good thing is, it also shows pinyin for Chinese characters. You should give it a try.

[tooironic]

I absolutely adore pablo.

It's free, easy-to-use, and has a decent-sized dictionary. Plus, you can look up words by writing them with your mouse cursor or electronic pen if you have one.