MS Encarta Dictionary - Free on the Mac


(Part of the What's on My Dock series being slowly pulled over from other writings.)

Well, of course, not really. But it is included with MS office, and discounting the OED (dead on the Mac, unless you can get a hold of the V2 CD-ROM and Mac app "OED2 CD-ROM vs.1.0d," which runs fine in Classic), is the best English dictionary available on the Mac. Can anyone tell me if it's available on the Win side of Office?

It'll be no substitute for your favourite dead tree dictionary I'm sure, but for road-warriors who want it all included in the iBook/Powerbook of choice, this one is a no brainer. Especially with the universal Edu discount. [ Can anyone tell me if Encarta is included in the non-Office Word stand alone?Without looking I know that Encarta itself is not available as a standalone.... ] A contextual menu is available for copying the 'Article' / definition. I love being able to hand out a text along with a corresponding appended glossary, it's just too bad there's no scripting ability in the dictionary so that I can't, for example, mark all words in a text and automatically create a glossary list to append.

There's no etymology, which is a shame, but I have to say the the majority of the definitions I've come across needing in class have pretty much served well.

In addition to the Encarta English Dictionary, I've got the following installed in Microsoft Office X/Shared Applications/Proofing Tools/. Wouldn't it be great if they were shared system wide.... Bwahaha
US English Thesaurus
US English Spelling Dictionary
US English Hyph Dictionary
UK English Thesaurus
Spanish Thesaurus Dict 2
Spanish Thesaurus Dict
Spanish Thesaurus
Spanish Spelling3
Spanish Hyphenation
Spanish Hyphen Dictionary
Spanish Dictionary
Italian Spelling3
French Thesaurus
French Spelling
French Grammar
English Thesaurus
English Spelling
English Hyphenation
English Grammar Dictionary
English Grammar
English (US) Word Forms
Australian Spelling Dictionary
Aus English Hyph Dictionary

Posted: Sun - October 19, 2003 at 08:49 PM            

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