Korean-English dictionary for Mac

April 24, 2010 2:49 PM

Do you know of a decent free/cheap Korean-English/English-Korean offline dictionary for Mac OSX 10.6?

I've found plenty of decent apps for iPhone and iPod Touch, but I don't have either of those devices.

posted by smorange to Writing & Language (2 answers total)

There appears to be a small, free English<>Korean dictionary floating around called ENGDIC [direct download link]. I can't speak personally as to the quality of the dictionary, since I don't speak Korean, but apparently it's kind of a mess. Also, since it's a command-line utility, it's probably not what you were thinking of-- but, if you can look past these things, it worked for me on OS X 10.4.

To get it running: unzip the file, and in a terminal run sudo make clean install inside the directory. (It generates some warnings from screen.c, but they don't seem to matter). Note that, to display the Korean characters correctly in the terminal window, you'll need to change the character encoding to "Korean (EUC)" in Terminal preferences. To search you can then just run engdic search_term.

Alternatively, it looks like you can use the same dictionary file from within LiveDictionary, a Safari plugin that looks pretty useful (but is not free). There may be other front-ends available, because I think the dictionary is in a standard format, but you'd have to dig around some more.

Hope this helps; it's lonely in this question.
posted by caaaaaam at 4:47 PM on April 26, 2010

Response by poster: I appreciate the attempt at an answer. ENGDIC isn't convenient enough for me to use the way I want to use it, unfortunately. I appreciate the effort, though. It seems that what I want might not exist.
posted by smorange at 6:43 PM on April 27, 2010