We’re pleased to announce that the ABC Cantonese dictionary is now available in our iOS + Android apps.

This brand new Cantonese-to-English dictionary – the first in several decades – features 15,000 Cantonese-specific vocabulary entries and a whopping 16,000 Cantonese example sentences, all with Jyutping/Yale pronunciation.

It was authored by the great Professor Robert S. Bauer of HKU and produced by Wenlin Institute (who offer a web-based version of it themselves for easy use on PC and Mac).

You can buy it right now for $29.99 through the “Add-ons” screen in our iOS and Android apps, or from our website store at store.pleco.com (direct purchase links: iOS / Android).

We’ve also launched two new Cantonese text-to-speech voices, Kayan and Kaho – also available in “Add-ons” – which you can use to hear headwords and examples from this (and any other Pleco dictionary) read out loud in Cantonese.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the ABC Cantonese dictionary in Pleco:

Along with today’s 3.2.16 bug-fix update on iOS, we’re also launching a beta test of a massive new update to our built-in PLC dictionary, featuring 40,000 new entries, 12,000 new example sentences, parts of speech for most entries, and many thousands of corrections and bug fixes.

On iOS you can download that beta by just going into Add-ons and clicking on the appropriate download button (“New PLC Beta”) on the main page.

On Android, installing this is a little more complicated (on iOS we’re taking advantage of some code we wrote to support updating built-in databases out of sync with our app, something that’s not really necessary on Android due to the lack of App Review). Download the beta from this link, unzip it, then copy the files inside of it to the /Android/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files/bmodules/12/50414345 folder on your device’s SD card, replacing the files that are in there now. (you may want to back those files up to another location first) If that sounds too complicated then just wait a few weeks and the database should be out officially.

The first public release of the Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters was just released in Pleco; see this blog post on Outlier’s site for details, or go into the Pleco “Add-ons” screen to purchase it.

Also, check the “Updated” section in Add-ons for a ton of dictionary updates; of particular note:

• CC-Canto just got a whole bunch of new single-character entries; basically, we took the CC-CEDICT entries for around 6000 characters and then rearranged them to add Cantonese-specific meanings and to group meanings with the correct Cantonese pronunciations in 多音字.
• ABC Proverbs now has linked ‘topic’ entries when you tap on a topic; you can also search for topics directly if you turn on “all-caps -> full-width” in Settings / Search Engine and then enter the topic name in all caps. (we also fixed a bunch of broken links)
• Hanyu Da Cidian got Pinyin fixes to around 20,000 entries and traditional character fixes to around 10,000 entries (mostly situations like 別 where there’s a minor traditional variant you would barely notice in a printed book but that would prevent you from searching correctly in an electronic dictionary).
• Grand Ricci got simplified character fixes to about 3,000 entries (a few cases like 内 where we were missing minor simplified variants) and we filled in some missing images in Histoire.
• Das Neue Worterbuch had a *ton* of bug fixes (thanks to our tireless users for submitting many of them) and is now up to something resembling a decent level of quality.
• Cross-Straits got a whole bunch of example sentence bug fixes, Xiandai Hanyu Dacidian a lot of variant entry fixes (no more embedded pronunciations in the middle of entries), and we also made various minor bug fixes / additions to ABC/ABE, both Tuttles, 21st Century, New Century, Adso, HanDeDict, CMT, NWP, Guifan, Lernworterbuch, and the FLTRP DeHan/HanDe/HanXi dictionaries.

Stay tuned for a beta version of our massive new update to PLC which should hopefully be coming next week.

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)