The Biggest, Badest and Most Comprehensive Chinese Dictionary for PC?

[Dang Dang]

I have looked long and hard to find a piece of software for PC that could match up to my expectations. I want to find a software dictionary that includes at least as many entries as Pleco Dict. I am willing to spend a few hundred dollars for it but everything I have seen seems small, out of date, or just to complicated. I want a simple modern interface that doesn't come up blank ever other word that I try to look up on it. Just recently I started running into trouble with the old online dictionaries I used to rely on. They were coming up blank and not have the info I needed.

Then there is the other thing I have always wanted. I want the Biggest, Badest, most comprehensive Chinese to English and English to Chinese Dictionary that exists on the face of the planet. But my requirements are that it is modern, has hanyu pinyin, and English definitions.

I would appreciate any help you can give me on my quest for the Biggest, Badest, Most Comprehensive dictionaries out there!!!!!!

Thanks,

Dang Dang

[trevelyan]

The ABC dictionary probably is the biggest dictionary you will find in electronic form that is licensed for sale, although whether it is comprehensive depends on what exactly you need to be reading. It has somewhere near 200,000 entries many of which slant more towards classical language. Ideal if you need to read Dream of the Red Chamber.

For more contemporary or field-specific areas you can always try the online machine translation engines in a crunch. Systran advertises having something like 500,000 entries in its system, although many of those are probably quite obscure medical terms.

Realistically though, the resource you want does not exist yet. So if you want more than your current dictionary offers, the best way to help create it. If you want support while reading more contemporary Chinese material, we are up to around 180,000 entries in the Adso database and have a tremendous amount of obscure content (sample additions today include 巨人岬 and 巴纳维亚盐带平地). You can check the dictionary interface here to see if we have the sort of content you need (if we don't have it, consider adding it):

http://www.adsotrans.com/adso/uniedit.pl

More long term, hopefully platforms like Plecodict will make it possible to search across multiple dictionaries at the same time, expanding the comprehensiveness of their reference services that way, and eliminating some of the gap that exists between the open source and commercial dictionaries worlds in terms of usefulness..

[gato]

You are looking for Wenlin, of course. It has the same dictionary, ABC by John DeFrancis, as PlecoDict

See http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?p=28315&highlight=wenlin#post28315

http://wenlin.com/

[in_lab]

The ABC dictionary probably is the biggest dictionary you will find in electronic form that is licensed for sale

So, to read between the lines, have you come across any unlicensed electronic CE dictionaries bigger than the ABC? Just curious.

[trevelyan]

So, to read between the lines, have you come across any unlicensed electronic CE dictionaries bigger than the ABC?

No, just that Systran presumably licenses its field-specific translation wordlists from someone.

[wizwan]

Have you tried the Babylon dictionary software? I do most of my studying on my laptop and I swear by it to check characters I don't know, it's really handy! Any word you come across you simply hightlight it, press Ctrl + right click and the meaning plus pinyin pops up. I have to admit it isn't perfect but it does a very good job.

See this link for prices: https://buy.babylon.com/index.php?template_id=6&trid=HPMENG

[thph2006]

I need a good modern PC dictionary as well. Lately I've been transcribing a lot of on-line Chinese audio material and I'd say sometimes as much as 20% of the content in a given script can't be found in any of the online dictionaries I use even though googling it brings up hundreds of hits in context. I just tried the adso (described in one of the previous posts) and had the same disappointing results...too bad. Guess I'll just have to keep looking or figure out a way to get good enough not to need a dictionary!

[flameproof]

have you come across any unlicensed electronic CE dictionaries bigger than the ABC? Just curious.

Ectaco for PDA has one with 400,000 words (their claim, I didn't count them)

However, I found it very difficult to use because it has no language examples. You type in an English word and get a number of translation - but don't know which one is the right one to use. Pleco is in that respect MUCH better as it gives examples.

http://www.lingvosoft.com/Partner-Dictionary-English-Chinese-Simplified-for-Pocket-PC/

[roddy]

I have looked long and hard to find a piece of software for PC that could match up to my expectations. I want to find a software dictionary that includes at least as many entries as Pleco Dict.

There's been mention of a desktop version of Pleco itself, so it might just be a matter of waiting. However, there's a notable absence of anything about it on Pleco's 2.0 preview page so it might not be coming out at the same time as 2.0 itself.

[flameproof]

There's been mention of a desktop version of Pleco itself, so it might just be a matter of waiting.

You can buy the current version and get a free upgrade to 2.0 once it's out. PlecoDict is such a good tool that I wouldn't wait for it again.

And the ABC has 100,000+ entries, I mean, how much more do you need?

But the very best about Pleco is that it gives examples of word usage.

[mikelove]

A desktop version of PlecoDict is coming, yes; in fact we're hoping to release one within 2-3 months after 2.0 is finalized. (could be sooner / later depending on how much time we spend hunting down 2.0 bugs)

The reason why that will happen so fast is that Windows Mobile and XP/Vista use an almost identical programming interface; in fact, if you don't mind it coming up in a 240x320 window you can convert a Windows Mobile application to run on regular Windows with just a few days' work.

But we're not making it part of 2.0 officially because we don't want to release a "real" desktop version until we've got handheld synchronization working, which at this point is not likely to happen until 2.1; in fact, the 2.0-based desktop version may end up being a "permanent beta" which we'd make available for sale but wouldn't do anything to actively promote until 2.1 came out.