I love the Dictionary tool in macOS, because it's a cool throwback to NEXTSTEP -- specifically the built-in dictionary, "Digital Webster":

https://systemfolder.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/next-webster/

Been using macOS for over 10 years, yet I was completely unaware it had an inbuilt dictionary until now. Thanks.

Then you'll be happy to hear about spotlight: hit command+space for instant search, including file contents and the dictionary.

(I'm assuming you have missed this as well because the dictionary is usually the first and sometimes the only result)

Alfred users can also configure it to look up words in Dictionary.app.

I use "define <word>" which IIRC is the default trigger.

For those who want to know why this is important, check out this blog post: https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

For those who want to give it a try on other operating systems, check out this website: https://www.websters1913.com/

That was quite informative, although to me, as a non-native English speaker, the basic descriptions are often more useful. It seems to make sense for the definition to be written in simpler terms then the term it defines. But I can see the appeal for someone looking to make their use of language less blunt.

Probably worth pointing out that dict, dictd, and web1913 have been included with Debian since last millennium. (The dict markup shows in the screenshot on https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary; dict and vh are the things that use {} to delimit references to other entries. Even the line breaks are preserved.) They don't have the nice CSS tho.

debian's adherence to ASCII-like typography probably killed a lot of information though

Howso?

It's hard to tell where the paragraph breaks are.

This is specifically in the dict datasets themselves?

Or a more general criticism of Debian's documentation philosophy?

If you're looking for an alternative dictionary on mobile, check out Vedaist (https://www.vedaist.com/). The dictionary entries are based on Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page) and I'd expect more modern meanings compared to the Webster's 1913. The UI is a subjective choice though.

The mac default dictionary is great for offline use and passive learning. With vedaist features are geared towards active learning with gamification.

Disclosure; I'm the creator of the Vedaist project.

Does Vedaist for mobile support fully offline usage? I really really dislike being spied on every time I use a dictionary that's hooked up to some API. I bought Dictionary-dot-com Pro a few years ago because it was the only such app I could find for iOS, but then they removed the offline functionality I paid for in a 2.0 release anyway :/

I use the chambers dictionary in iOS for offline access

Nope, sorry. Vedaist has online features like sync and the word catalog of almost a million words would be too large for fully offline usage. But I've also implemented product analytics which you (and many others) dislike.

I'd recommend wiktionary.org. Although it is an online dictionary it's part of the Wikipedia family and hence are better compared to other companies with regards to privacy.

A million words shouldn't take tons of storage, right? How big is your database?

I spend around 500 megabytes on offline maps for OsmAnd and don't really worry about it. I would have naively guessed a million word definitions wouldn't be larger than that.

Why do you say it's too large for fully offline usage?

Wiktionary dumps are around 1gb for a million words and definitions (https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/) uncompressed. However this is just raw text.

We have images as well like https://www.vedaist.com/en/w/clarsach.html. Audio pronunciations in wiktionary are sound files. Binary resources take a lot more space.

For mobile apps, if the size increases a lot then the first download experience is not great. After a certain size the app is not usable for low end smartphones.

Hence I'm not sure about fully offline for a rich/modern dictionary mobile app. Downloading partial information offline like a temporary cache is possible though.

On android, you have Livio which is offline, tracker free and free of charge as well.

That's pretty disappointing that MacOS has an unmatched dictionnary app but iOS is forgotten while there is decent options on Android.

I love having an OSX embedded dictionary but boy-o-boy, I hate how easily it appears I trigger it, highlighting words for a right-click function other than "look it up in the dictionary"

Dammit, I just wanted to right click "Web search" that term. Now.. I have to remember how to make this dictionary popover disappear, and keep the selection.

The two ways I know to trigger it is hovering over a word and pressing ctrl-cmd-d, or force-touching the trackpad. So I suppose you are accidentally pushing too hard so it triggers the force-touch?

If you don't like it, you can disable the force touch in the trackpad settings. It seems you can also set it to be three-finger-tap on the touchpad.

I didn’t realize you could add custom dictionaries to the Dictionary app on macOS. Can something similar be done for iOS and iPadOS?

In French, always the Littré: https://www.littre.org/

The exact opposite of dry, modern dictionary, you can read it along for the quality of its prose, and its numerous and interesting quotes.

Dictionary.app is one of my favorite macOS programs; I use it regularly, and Dictionary.app is something that I miss whenever I'm not on my Mac.

I'm wondering if there are similar offline dictionaries available for Windows and Linux? I know at one point the Oxford English Dictionary was distributed on CD-ROM, but the CD-ROM version is unfortunately discontinued and access requires an online subscription. I also remember Microsoft Bookshelf from the 1990s, but that's also been long discontinued.

I know that there are plenty of nice dictionaries and other references on the Web, but I like using offline dictionaries for a handful of reasons, chiefly: 1. Having offline access is handy when my Internet connection is down. 2. The latency of doing a lookup on Dictionary.app is much lower than looking up a Web dictionary. 3. Not being bombarded with other media to keep me engaged on the site (I'm looking at you, merriam-webster.com).

I would love to pay a company like Merriam Webster or Oxford University Press for downloadable access to the dictionary database, and I'm willing to pay the same price as the equivalent printed dictionary. However, I understand the business motivation as to why this may not be possible: it would be easy to pirate dictionary databases, and it possibly more lucrative to place the database behind either a subscription paywall or on a website with ads.