We’re very excited to announce that we’ve just signed a license for the forthcoming ABC Cantonese Dictionary, edited by Robert Bauer, which we hope to start offering in Pleco in early-to-mid 2017. This is the first comprehensive Cantonese-to-English dictionary published in 30 years, and includes entries for about 15,000 Cantonese-specific words, with part-of-speech tagging and lots of useful example sentences. It should be a huge leap forward for Cantonese learning and we’re delighted to be able to offer it in Pleco.

We’ve also made arrangements with our friends at Wenlin to offer a free offline Pleco copy of the dictionary to some backers of their ABC Cantonese Dictionary website Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wenlin/wenlin-abc-cantonese-dictionary-website-ed-robert

So you can now choose a Kickstarter reward level that includes a free, non-time-limited offline copy of the dictionary to use in Pleco.

This Kickstarter is also well worth checking out even if you’re not particularly interested in Cantonese; it’s actually part of a much bigger move for Wenlin towards rolling out a full-featured web-based dictionary platform, and in fact several of the reward tiers also include access to their forthcoming web versions of the Mandarin ABC Chinese-English and English-Chinese Dictionaries.

Here’s a sample of some entries from the printed ABC Cantonese dictionary, to give you some idea of what it’s going to look like:

(we’re working to rig up some Pleco preview screenshots too; stay tuned for those)

We’ve just released a massive new English-Chinese dictionary add-on, the New Century English-Chinese Dictionary 《新世纪英汉大词典》 from Collins + 外研社. It’s available for $29.99 via the “Add-ons” screen and our online store.

This is a brand new English-to-Chinese dictionary – published in 2016 – and contains a whopping 240,000 entries, making it comparable in size / scope to our older 21st Century dictionary. It also features 130,000 example sentences, the most of any single C-E or E-C dictionary we’ve ever offered (by comparison, 21C has about 50,000, our built-in PLC dictionary has 63,000, and ABC C-E has about 18,000). It also includes helpful English sense discriminators to let you quickly find the specific English sense of a word like “air” or “narrow” that you want to convey in Chinese. And as the product of a Sino-British joint venture it excels both at English (with comprehensive coverage of words and their senses, based on the authoritative Collins corpus) and Chinese (with good accurate idiomatic translations).

As with all E-C dictionaries of this size/scale, there’s no Pinyin, but you can easily look up the Pinyin for individual words in entries by tapping, and as with all of our dictionaries you can hear example sentences read out loud by tapping on the speaker icons next to them.

As of today, we’re replacing the 21st Century dictionary with this new dictionary in our Professional bundle; anybody who’s bought the Professional Bundle since July 1st will automatically get this dictionary for free (just go into Registration / Check for other purchases), and future purchasers will get it included instead of 21st Century.

You can download a demo of this title in Add-ons to try it out; go into Add-ons, go into its detail page, tap on the button to download the demo, and when that download finishes tap on the button (still on that detail page) to browse through the dictionary’s entries.

We have many more exciting dictionary launches planned for the next year; also, stay tuned for an update on progress / features for our hotly anticipated Big Flashcard Revamp.

We just added an option to upgrade the Basic bundle to Professional in-app on iOS, for the difference in price ($50); we’d already been doing a version of that unofficially through our website on request (since Apple lets us sell dictionaries outside of their store and those represent most of the difference between Basic and Professional), but now you can do it right in “Add-ons.”

We’ll likely add a similar option in-app on Android soon, but in the meantime, if you’re an Android user who’d like to do that upgrade, just email support and we’ll be happy to arrange it for you via our website. (as on iOS, we’ve been doing that unofficially for years now)