MacOS X 10.5 Japanese Dictionary

[Charles]

OK, am I totally clueless and the last person to hear of this new feature of MacOS X, or is this the best, most obscure, unknown feature ever? MacOS X 10.5 now includes a JE/EJ Dictionary! It is always one click away, forget Rikai and WWWJDIC.



more inside..

[Charles]

I only found about the dictionary by accident. I was talking to someone about Kotoeri, he described how great the dictionary was. I thought he was talking about the little popup definitions in Kotoeri, but no, he was talking about the main Dictionary.app that comes with MacOS X. I had no idea there was a full Japanese dictionary in MacOS X. This appears to be a new feature of 10.5 Leopard.

To activate the dictionaries, go to Dictionary.app and enable them in Preferences. There are 3 Japanese dicts, The Progressive EJ/JE Dict, Daijiten kokugo jiten, and a dictionary of synonyms. I find the EJ/JE dict is sufficient, in fact, it is excellent.
Once this dict is enabled, a definition is only one click away. You can select any Japanese word (in a browser window for example) and right-click to get a menu offering "Look Up in Dictionary." If the selected text is Japanese, it goes right to the definition. You can also select a word, hover the cursor over it and hit command-control-D to get the little popup definition without launching Dictionary.app. You can also look up an English word and click the JE tab, for an E>J lookup.

Oh man is that useful. This is the holy grail of Mac Japanese computing, I've always wished for a system-level dictionary and this is a really good implementation, even the typography is excellent. So excuse me for gushing about it, this was a "forehead-slapping moment" for me, I usually know about these features but I was pleasantly surprised to have someone educate me about it. So I'll pass it along in case anyone else missed this great feature.

[nipponjin]

FANTASTIC!!!

Thanks a lot for letting us know this well-hidden feature!

Cheers

nipponjin

[American Oyaji]

Thanks for the input Chuck. This may be the tipping point for my company getting me a MacBook instead of a Lenovo computer.

[Charles]

It was hiding in plain sight. I use Dictionary.app all the time, this was obviously a huge upgrade but it never occurred to me to check the prefs and see if there was anything new. As my dear departed mother would have said, "if it was a snake, it would have bit you!"
I noticed a few quirks, the kokugo jiten had place names and the JE/EJ didn't, and I wish there was a kanji dictionary. But this is a hell of a start, it can only get better, as Apple is obviously putting some effort into Japanese computing.

[maraboutslim]

I wonder if I just had the .dict files (they are stored in library/dictionaries) for the new japanese dictionaries if i could add them and make it work even in OS10.4? Anyone want to participate in a test? pm please...

[alicia454]

Wow, thank you very very much. I just enabled it on my MacBook and now I can't live without it! It is quite useful.

Maybe we should start a Guijin Mac user group?

Thanks again.

[Charles]

Originally Posted by maraboutslim

I wonder if I just had the .dict files (they are stored in library/dictionaries) for the new japanese dictionaries if i could add them and make it work even in OS10.4? Anyone want to participate in a test? pm please...

Just get the Leopard upgrade, you deserve it. Dictionary.app was upgraded in 10.5 to support multiple dictionaries, I suspect it uses Leopard-specific features. It hooks pretty deeply into the OS so it would be unlikely to work in 10.4.

[Charles]

Originally Posted by alicia454

Wow, thank you very very much. I just enabled it on my MacBook and now I can't live without it! It is quite useful.

Maybe we should start a Guijin Mac user group?

Thanks again.

There are a lot of Mac users around FG, we are a user group of sorts.

It's amazing how fast you can get used to a whizzy new feature, it becomes indispensable instantly. I haven't seen anything like this since the old UniDict, it was the first Mac implementation of a contextual-menu dictionary lookup, sometime around 1995. But this MacOS X version is way, way better.

[GomiGirl]

Originally Posted by Charles

I haven't seen anything like this since the old UniDict, it was the first Mac implementation of a contextual-menu dictionary lookup, sometime around 1995.

Why thank you Charles - that is the nicest thing you have ever said about me.

We never made an OSX version but focussed on mobile implementations through the Newton, Psion, Palm, Nokia etc and now of course on keitai. Perhaps you may have heard of TangoTown?

The last version of UniDICT that was made for Mac or any desktop was v1.5 in 1999 I think. There were lots of things we wanted to do with the Mac version but the business model (ie cheap fuckers not wanting to pay for desktop software) really doesn't lend itself to extensive development of useful features.