posted by dictionary on October 18, 2008 | 0 comments
We've just put the first version of our Popup Chinese Dictionary online, and warmly invite you to check it out. You can find the dictionary in the Tools section, or at this link:
Popup Chinese Dictionary
In addition to a boatload of dictionary data, the Popup Chinese Dictionary has a sexy javascript-powered navigation system to help you find characters by their dominant radical. Because of the amount of data being downloaded, it may take a moment to load the dictionary page on your first visit. After that things should work quite quickly as most of the data will be cached.
The dictionary has a number of special features, and we're planning more. Probably the most notable feature at this point is the embedded collaborative editing/review/adding functionality. Everyone is welcome to add/edit entries and help us correct any existing entries. All corrections and additions benefit our broad community, including projects which take advantage of this data like ZDT and Perakun.
Development is going to continue on this. And traditional lovers... we'll be adding expanded support for traditional search/navigation once the interface is finalized.
garethamew on October 18, 2008 | reply
i like the dictionary, but don't understand how to use the boxes on the side to find words. What is "++" supposed to mean?
dictionary on October 19, 2008 | reply
@garethamew - the radicals are organized by the number of strokes it takes to write them. 一 is one, 无 is four, 西 is six, etc. The box with ++ holds all radicals that take more than nine strokes to write. There are few enough of these it makes sense to group them together.Cheers,--david
Possible to make it a popup window? To enable users to read articles and use the dictionary at the same time?
The dictionary is linked to the Popup Firefox plugin, as well as a number of other applications. If people want dictionary popups on other pages, they should install the Firefox plugin, discussion here:Chinese Popup Dictionary PluginEdits made to the dictionary will spread out into these other applications automatically. We'll probably publish updates on a weekly basis.
Hi Dave, just a question. Are there any plans to include Chinese language explanations/definitions in the dictionary? Or maybe a separate Chinese-Chinese dictionary plugin?
interesting idea. will have to give some thought as to how best to do it, to ensure we can still fully support traditional/simplified options site-wide.
An upgraded version is out the door. You can download/upgrade at the usual location. Everything should be automated:http://popupchinese.com/words/pluginThere are a couple of important changes. Most importantly, this version is a LOT friendlier to tabbed browsing. If you used multiple tabs with the last version its behavior could become inconsistent. And sometimes if the browser started with multiple tabs already open it would simply refuse to cooperate until you closed them and opened a new tab. No more. I haven't noticed any problems with turning the new version on/off and switching between tabs isn't a problem.Also, we've got some improvements with iframe support, meaning that the popups will actually show up inside iframes.There are still some pages in Xinhua where the position of the popup is *off* when you are mousing over some iframes. This is still bothering me, but I'll probably give it a rest for a day or two before clambering back into javascript debugging. One would think that something as simple as "give me the X, Y coordinates under the mouse please" would be a solved problem for browser developers as we steamroll towards 2009. But apparently not. If anyone is a Firefox javascript genius I'd love to hear from you.