As a writer, one of my disappointments with Ubuntu has been a decent English-English dictionary and thesaurus. I’d tried Stardict,. and I think Moby Thesaurus, but couldn’t get them going. I’ve compensated by installing the excellent windows program WordWeb, via Wine.
But poor old WordWeb, while it works, looks a bit lame in Ubuntu (I suppose in Gnome), a bit like Skype does, apart from the fact that it takes an age to load in Wine. So this evening I found myself annoyed, and determined to find a Linux alternative.
I spotted OpenDict in Add/Remove Applications and installed it. Anything with Open in it has got to be good, right? I was initially disappointed, despite the accompanying Irish/English, Spanish/English, and English/German dictionaries, which I was pleased to find. But I didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of downloading and installing new English-English dictionaries, even if I could find them.
It was then I tried Tools/Connect to Dict Server in OpenDict. Hey presto, a great English-English dictionary, complete with etymologies, plus a Thesaurus, comprising of returns from The Collaborative International Dictionary of English, Wordnet, and Moby Thesaurus II.
What more could I ask?
OpenDict is a multiplatform dictionary, and it’s website is here
Thanks to all concerned.
This shows a curious feature of the libre/open source world: the very best software sits there waiting to be noticed.
In the familiar commercial world yuo can be reasonably sure that whoever shouts the loudest has an adequate product - whether it be choccy biscuits or a dictionary. In OSS it sits there quietly. People on the forums tend to tell you: “try out this .. or this.. and see which you prefer.”
Now to try out OpenDict - hadn’t heard of it before. I found the default dictionary on ubuntu to be pretty good.
You know, skype has a package for linux >> http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/
Thanks, Durand. Yes, I have Skype on Ubuntu, but it looked pretty old. I have to admit that it looks better, as do most of my programs, since I changed to the Industrial Tango theme for Gnome.