French/English dictionary update

Today's update adds various new entries to the French dictionary and follows in the wake of other recent updates by including various improvements to commonly consulted entries in the English-French side of the dictionary.

500th forum member; dictionary update

Good news, everybody.


The French language forum has reached its 500th member! Many thanks to all those who participate in the forum, be it to ask questions about French or to help learners. If you haven't discovered it yet, the forum is a great community for expanding your knowledge of French, even if you're just beginning, or simply for chatting to other French speakers and learners.

I'd like to take this opportunity to plug the on-line "chat" function. A few regulars are already using it, but it would be nice to see more users taking advantage.

On a smaller note, the English-French side of the dictionary has today seen a few more additions, as part of an ongoing effort to improve the entries to various commonly looked up words.

English-French dictionary update

Today's update to the dictionary focuses on various new entries and improvements to existing entries in the English-French dictionary. New and/or improved entries have been included for various frequently looked up words, including special entries for various conjugated forms of verbs.

English-French dictionary update

Today's update focusses primarily on improvements to various entries in the English-French side of the dictionary. The entries to various commonly lookuped up words have been expanded and clarified.

Dictionary update

A few minor corrections and updates have also been made to the French dictionary.

Dictionary update

The latest update to the dictionary contains various corrections, new words and phrases, plus improvements to various commonly-referenced entries in the English-French section of the dictionary.

French dictionary update

The latest update to the French dictionary contains various new words and terms that have proven topical in recent news reports.

English monolingual dictionary

Keen-eyed users will have noted that you can now search the (public domain) 1913 edition of the Webster Unabridged Dictionary on this site. This is one of the tools used in compiling the French-English dictionary; I decided to make the search publicly available essentially because I "may as well". At the moment, the interface is somewhat crude, but crude interface or not, the dictionary contains over 100,000 entries and is still a valuable reference.

Because the dictionary is old, certain definitions clearly don't reflect modern usage (see entries for car, van and computer, for example), whilst other words are simply non-existent. And certain of the examples, already belonging to somewhat literary language at the time, are now positively absolete. But it turns out that the meanings of many of the "difficult" or lesser known words that we sometimes need to look up while reading an English text have changed very little in the last century.

English-French updates

Various entries in the English-French dictionary have been improved over the last couple of days. Further improvements are on the way, with the aim that the English-French side will soon be more in line with the French-English side. Watch this space...!

Mobile dictionary on BlackBerry

A kind poster has brought my attention to a possible problem with the mobile dictionary on a BlackBerry. While I investigate, I'd be grateful if anybody else has feedback on this or any other issue relating to the mobile version of the dictionary, as I'm planning an update to the mobile version soon.

Dictionary update: DGT glossary beta

Along with its sister Spanish dictionary and language site, entries in this site's on-line French dictionary have now been augmented with terms from the EU DGT Multilingual Translation Memory. The latter is a set of translated terms, phrases and sentences extracted from translations of EU documents. It thus covers translation of various legal and technical domains. At present, approximately 30,000 terms and phrases are included on this site. (Some long or repetitious entries have been filtered out.)

The terms from the DGT glossary currently appear in a table below the regular dictionary entries. At present, they are included for French-English lookups only, but it is planned that terms for English-French lookups will be added over the next few days.

Mobile version of the dictionary

An initial mobile phone version of the French dictionary is now available:

• The mobile version is designed to work on phones that support WAP 1.1
• The mobile version contains some stripped-down entries to cope better with the smaller screen of mobile phones
• At present, only French-English lookups are supported. (English-French coming soon!)
  
• It is free to access (other than your mobile operator's cost to access the Internet on your phone!)
• Suggestions are welcome as comments on this blog entry!
  

Dictionary Update

The French-English and English-French dictionaries have been updated. The update includes improvements to various French-English entries, plus various corrections to English-French entries suggested in recent feedback (including entries for basic words such as house and good).