Help

About

This is a Thai-English, English-Thai dictionary. It allows you to:

The dictionary has been designed to be very fast and easy to use. For example, however over any Thai word in orange will produce a pop-up with the word's short definitions. Clicking on the word (Thai or English) will show the full definition on the right hand side of the screen.

Jump to: Word Lookup Bulk Lookup Browse My Wordlist Issues & Limitations

Word Look up

To look up individual words, select the "Word Lookup" tab, then enter a word in the text box below the “keyboard". Words can be entered in three ways:

  1. By typing in the box. As you type, the application will look up words matching what you've typed and display a list of them. To see the full definition of the first word in the list press Enter. To see the definition of one of the others on the list, select it either by clicking on it with your mouse, or navigating up and down the list using your keyboard's up and down arrow keys, then pressing Enter.
  2. By typing the word by clicking on the keyboard on the screen. The keyboard can be switched from Thai to English or hidden by selecting the appropriate [TH][EN][Hide]button.
  3. By pasting a single word or fixed expression from another web page or document into the text box.

If you're typing with the keyboard or pasting a word you don't need to select the language with one of the buttons – the application can work out which language you're typing automatically.

A list of matching words and expressions will appear below the box. Click on one of these to see the definition (or possibly multiple definitions) on the right hand side of the page. Alternatively you can select one of the matching words/expressions using the up/down arrows on your keyboard, then pressing Enter.

The panel on the right hand side of the screen keeps a record of the last 12 words that you've looked up. You can revisit any of these words definitions by clicking on the word on the right hand side of the screen.

To hide a definition, click on the cross in the top right hand corner of the definition.[Hide]

In certain circumstances (see My Wordlist, below for details), a plus button is also shown.[Add] Click on this button to add the word to your personal wordlist.

Jump to: Word Lookup Bulk Lookup Browse My Wordlist Issues & Limitations

Bulk Look up

Select the "Bulk Lookup" tab, then paste the text to be looked up in the box on the left hand side of the screen. Your computer will then compare the text you've pasted with the contents of the dictionary. Hover over any word or expression (Thai only) to see a translation as a pop-up. Click on any word or expression and the dictionary entry will be displayed on the right hand side with additional grammatical information, including (where available) synonyms, antonyms and examples of use.

Words/phrases in the dictionary are shown in orange; expressions not in the dictionary are shown in black and can't be clicked on.

Where a reading is ambiguous, the phrase is shown underlined. Hovering over the phrase will show both both readings as a pop-up tip.

Jump to: Word Lookup Bulk Lookup Browse My Wordlist Issues & Limitations

Browse

Select the "Browse Dictionary" tab.

The first two buttons ([TH] and [EN] allow you to select the language to be browsed – either Thai or English respectively.

After clicking on one of these buttons the appropriate alphabet will be displayed. Click on a letter and below you'll see a list of word ranges (e.g. click on [TH], then [P] and one of the buttons will show [principality:proboscis]. To see words alphabetically between principality and proboscis click on that button. Click on any word to add its definition to the right hand side of the screen. (For Thai words only, hovering over the word will show a brief definition.)

Jump to: Word Lookup Bulk Lookup Browse My Wordlist Issues & Limitations

My Wordlist

Note: this tab only appears if your browser supports HTML5 Local Storage - older browsers and some mobile devices don't.

This tab shows words that you've added to your personal wordlist which is stored on your computer, from the Word Lookup, Bulk Lookup or Browse Dictionary

To remove a word from your wordlist, click on the cross to the left of the word. (Clicking on the cross in the top right hand corner of a definition will not remove the word from your wordlist - it will simply hide it.)

[remove]

Jump to: Word Lookup Bulk Lookup Browse My Wordlist Issues & Limitations

Issues & Limitations

The first time this application is run (and when the dictionary is updated) it loads two word lists (one English, one Thai) from the website. This initial load can be slow (depending on the speed of your Internet connection). These word lists are then stored on your computer, so the next time you use the dictionary it won't need to download the word lists and it will start very much faster.

(Some older browsers don't have the ability to store the word lists locally, in which case the word lists have to be downloaded each time the Dictionary is used. Users of some mobile devices will experience the same performance issue.)

For Opera users: you will probably be prompted asking whether you should allow the application additional storage space. This appears to be a bug in Opera's calculation of required storage space. However, if you answer “yes" all should be well. (The actual amount of data stored on your computer is 3.0 MB.)

After the word lists are downloaded the application builds an in-memory index of both Thai and English words. This allows for very fast word lookup once the application is running, but the index building process may take a few seconds. (In Opera this process is particularly slow.)

Known Issues

  1. The dictionaries are provided by a third party (see credit below). Unfortunately, there is a significant number of common words and recently introduced words missing. The dictionaries are also internally inconsistent – not every word appearing in a definition appears in the dictionary. Also, a lot of the IPA readings for Thai words are missing.
  2. For “Bulk Lookup" where expressions are ambiguous, the pop-up shows alternative readings. However, (despite appearing as links) the individual words can't be clicked on. Fixed
  3. Display of IPA for Thai words can take a second or two for the IPA font to download. The third party IPA is inconsistent, and not all Thai words have an IPA representation.
  4. Because of technical limitations it wasn't possible to include definitions on hovering over English words; to see the definition of an English word you need to click on it. Fixed - though English definitions may take a second or two to load

This product is created by the adaptation of LEXiTRON developed by NECTEC (http://www.nectec.or.th/).