Dictionary (software)
| Dictionary | |
|---|---|
 | |
 Dictionary running under Mac OS X Leopard, showing Wikipedia's page on Wikipedia. | |
| Developer(s) | Apple Inc. |
| Stable release | 2.1.2 (80.3)
/ June 15, 2010 |
| Operating system | Mac OS X |
| Type | dictionary |
| Website | http://www.apple.com |
Dictionary is an application developed by Apple for its Macintosh computers. It was introduced with Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger", and provides definitions and synonyms from the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition and Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, 2nd Edition, and now includes Wikipedia which doesn't work very well as of November, 2010 and a section which includes Apple related items called Apple.
History
OS X's progenitor, OPENSTEP (and NEXTSTEP) provided similar functionality, called Digital Webster, providing dictionary and thesaurus definitions from Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and Webster's Collegiate Thesaurus (termed the "First Digital Edition"). OPENSTEP Services provide lookup from all applications.
Functionality
In applications which support "Services", there is an option in the application menu (for example, Safari>Services>Look up in Dictionary) which brings up the Dictionary application and displays the definition of a selected word. Apple also included a Dashboard Widget for accessing the Dictionary application. The key combination ⌃ ⌘ D can be used in Cocoa applications which display text — it brings up a small contextual menu-like definition or synonym of the word under the cursor. OS X has a system wide spelling and grammar checker that uses the Dictionary vocabulary.
Mac OS X v10.5 introduced additional features. For example, it now includes the Japanese-language dictionary Daijisen, Progressive English to Japanese and Progressive Japanese to English dictionaries, and the 25,000-word thesaurus "Tsukaikata no Wakaru Ruigo Reikai Jiten" (使い方の分かる類語例解辞典), all of which are provided by the Japanese publisher Shogakukan.
Leopard also introduced the use of Wikipedia. However, since the redesign of Wikipedia in the first quarter of 2010, and for participants in the usability study in late 2009, the scrolling functionality of Wikipedia in Dictionary does not work. No scrollbars are present, and users are not able to scroll to parts of the article which weren't already visible within the constraints of the window size upon loading a Wikipedia article. One can 'drag' or 'highlight' the text and move the cursor down to reveal more of the page, but no fix has been forthcoming from Apple, so users are unfortunately forced into having to Turn new features off in their Wikipedia account with Wikipedia opened in the Safari web browser, in order for Wikipedia in Dictionary to work properly[1]).
The dictionary and thesaurus in Dictionary are in an XML format, but make use of precompiled binary index files to access the XML file directly, excluding the option of expansion of the dictionary. The application's preferences allow a user to select from three different pronunciation schemes, either US English (Diacritical or IPA), or British English (IPA).
Software such as DictUnifier[2] can be used to add more dictionaries to the application.
Another functionality of the spellchecker facility on OS X is that users can alter the language (or even variant of language; e.g. English to the more precise British English) on-the-fly within whatever program they may be using. Simply by either Control Clicking inside a text input box (or by going to the Edit drop menu) and then selecting Spelling and Grammar>Show Spelling and Grammar; a window appears where language spellchecked can be changed. In addition to this, language options have also got to be chosen for system menus, under the International button on the System Preferences, there are additional language settings done in an order of preference a user may want their language choices to be used shown in system menus for each program (depending on what language each program might have available).
Errata
- The lexicon of the English language spell checking services (which are also universally accessible in Cocoa applications) are not the same as the Dictionary's lexicon. Thus, the New Oxford American Dictionary 2nd Edition is not the basis for spell checking in Mac OS X "Tiger".
- Double clicking on any word searches for that word in the dictionary again; you can click on almost any word except the pronunciations in phonetic characters and numerals.
- Apple catches any queries to the
dict:///URI scheme, say from a web browser, and routes them back to the Dictionary application.
- The thesaurus entry for "democracy" used to have, as its usage sentence, "a democracy in Iraq is quite unlikely for now or any time soon." Some have claimed this was a political comment added by an Apple programmer; however, Oxford University Press has confirmed that this statement originates from their corpora, not Apple's, and was not meant to have a political interpretation[3]. This has changed – under Snow Leopard (OSX, 10.6) it reads: "freedom of speech is essential to democracy."
