StarDict, developed by Hu Zheng (胡正), is a
free GUI released under the
GPL-3.0-or-later license for accessing StarDict dictionary files (a ''dictionary shell''). It is the successor of StarDic, developed by Ma Su'an (馬蘇安), continuing its version numbers.
According to StarDict's earlier homepage on
SourceForge, the project has been removed from SourceForge due to
copyright infringement reports. It moved to
Google Code and then back to SourceForge, while development is now seemingly continued on
GitHub
GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...
.
Supported platforms
StarDict runs under
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
,
Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
,
FreeBSD,
Maemo and
Solaris. Dictionaries of the user's choice are installed separately. Dictionary files can be created by converting
dict files.
Several programs compatible with the StarDict dictionary format are available for different platforms. For the
iPhone
The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...
,
iPod Touch
The iPod Touch (stylized as iPod touch) is a discontinued line of iOS-based mobile devices designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. with a touchscreen-controlled user interface. As with other iPod models, the iPod Touch can be used as a po ...
and
iPad, applications available in the
App Store include GuruDic, TouchDict, weDict, Dictionary Universal, Alpus and others, as well as the free iStarDict, which is available for the
Cydia Store.
Dictionaries available
One can find
here the partial list of FreeDict dictionaries which can be converted to the StarDict format. These include, in particular, some older versions of Webster's dictionary and many dictionaries for various languages.
Features
While StarDict is in ''scan mode'', results are displayed in a
tooltip, allowing easy dictionary lookup. When combined with Freedict, StarDict will quickly provide rough translations of foreign language websites.
On September 25, 2006, an online version of Stardict began operation. This online version includes access to all the major dictionaries of StarDict, as well as Wikipedia in Chinese.
Previous versions of StarDict were very similar to the
PowerWord dictionary program, which is developed by a Chinese company, KingSoft. Since version 2.4.2, however, StarDict has diverged from the design of PowerWord by increasing its search capabilities and adding lexicons in a variety of languages. This was assisted by the collaboration of many developers with the author.
Evgeniy A. Dushistov produced the command line version of StarDict called
sdcv.
See also
*
Machine translation
*
sdcv
References
External links
{{commons category
Stardict project Github pageSourceforge pageGoogle Code archived page
RPM resource stardict-dictionary
How to install StarDict on Linux maemo os2008
(in Russian)
DICT clients
Free dictionary software
Free software programmed in C++
Dictionary software that uses GTK
Machine translation
Translation dictionaries
Dictionary formats
Language software for Linux
Language software for Windows