Installing GoldenDict on Ubuntu 19.10

Sometimes we need to look up the definitions of words when unfamiliar words appear. GoldenDict is a free and ad-free dictionary software that supports multiple platforms including Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Moreover, it has other advantages listed below:

• supports multiple dictionary formats
• supports searching in Wikipedia and Online translation
• supports words lookup with text selection
• supports words pronunciation

To install GoldenDict on Ubuntu is easy:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install goldendict

Managing Dictionary

We can search dictionaries from arbitrary websites, here are two of them: http://download.huzheng.org/ and https://github.com/skywind3000/ECDICT/releases.

After downloading the compressed dictionaries, it’s better to put all of them together:

mkdir /usr/share/sharedict/dic
tar -xjvf dict.tar.bz2 -C /usr/share/stardict/dic

Next, we need to configure the GoldenDict to scan the dictionary folder by opening the menu Edit -- Dictionaries ... or shortcut F3. In the Sources tab -- Files tab, click Add... button, browse the directory we store the dictionaries. Then, we click Rescan now button to load the dictionaries.

Adding Morphology

The application is still kind of stupid that only searches the given characters and it can’t handle the scenario with different tenses. In this case, we need to add the morphology dictionary so it can understand the spelling.

We can download the English morphology dictionary from here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dda9n4sok28wek7/en_US_1.0.zip. Unzip the archive and put it under /usr/share/stardict/morphology.

Then, we go to the same location where we set up the dictionary sources. Find the Morphology Tab, we can add the morphology source directory and enable the morphology dictionaries.

Now the dictionary will recognize the origin words from different tenses.

Online Lookup

Here are some sources for online words lookup:

• Bing: https://bing.com/dict/search?q=%GDWORD%
• iciba: http://www.iciba.com/%GDWORD%/
• zdic: http://www.zdic.net/sousuo/?q=%GDWORD%

You can add those source links in the same location where we set up the dictionary sources in the Websites tab.

Appendix

List of supported dictionary formats:

* XDXF (XML Dictionary eXchange Format)
* Babylon (.bgl) 
* StarDict (.ifo、.dict、.idx、.syn)
* Dictd (.index、.dict、.dz)
* ABBYY Lingvo (.dsl)
* ABBYY Lingvo (.lsa、.dat) 
* Sdictionary (.dct)
* Aard (.aar)
* MDict (.mdx、.mdd)

Further readings for detailed functionalities:

[1] https://www.jianshu.com/p/b6b2c1d78d7c

[2] https://blog.einverne.info/post/2018/08/goldendict.html