How many words are in the Ultralingua dictionaries?

The number of "entries" is hard to specify, because dictionary makers have different ways of counting. Also, different dictionaries have different content. Nevertheless, here are some indications:

• Our English dictionary of definitions has over 250,000 entries, under some 70,000 headwords; it also includes over 80,000 entries in its thesaurus.
  
  
• Most of our bilingual dictionaries contain approximately 300,000 translation entries (although Italian-English, Portuguese-English, and French-German have somewhat fewer). Note that many Palm dictionaries are also available in compact versions for those with limited RAM; these versions have about 2/3 of the contents of full versions, but are still very complete for most purposes.
  
  
• Our verb conjugators contain conjugations for all known verbs in each language (usually some 6-7000 verbs, not counting reflexive forms). The conjugation of each verb may include 70 different forms, resulting in a total number forms in the hundreds of thousands -- for a given language.
  You can learn more about individual dictionaries by looking at product information sheets. (Click on the appropriate links on our Products page).

How do I find support for Collins Products?

Because Ultralingua produces many of the Collins products, the instructions provided in this FAQ for Ultralingua dictionaries will almost certainly pertain to Collins products, too. If you have questions about the content of the Collins dictionaries, or have technical support questions not answered here, please contact Collins directly at support@collinsdictionaries.com

What if I have technical questions about Grammatica?

Grammatica uses some of the same technical architecture as Ultralingua, so look through the Ultralingua FAQ before contacting us. You can also consult the Grammatica manual (under the Help manual of Grammatica), or the readme (look in the listing to the right of this FAQ page).

How does Ultralingua use OS X services?

Apple's OS 10 offers system wide services through the "Services" menu of each application (look under the application's main menu). This means that certain features of one application may be used from within another application. Within applications that are "OS 10 services enabled" (applications such as Eudora, Mail, TexEdit, Safari -- but currently not Word or AppleWorks), you can use the services menu to send a selected word to Ultralingua. Better yet, you can select a word in one of these applications, and then use the keyboard shortcut "Command-Shift-E" to send it directly to Ultralingua. Here is what you need to do to use OS 10 services:

• Install Ultralingua 4.2 or higher in the Applications folder of your hard drive. (Services are only available from this folder.)
  
  
• Restart your machine; or, log out of OS 10, and log back in. (You may have to wait a few moments the first time the system scans for new services.)
  
  
• Ultralingua should be enabled.

How do I add / delete entries?

Adding and deleting personal entries is currently available in version 4 of Ultralingua for Mac and Windows, and will be available for version 2.0 of the Palm product.

There were some problems with handling some kinds of adding and deleting on Mac and Windows versions before version 4.12. If you have an earlier version of version 4, you may download the later version at no charge. (Be sure to replace the entire Ultralingua folder with the new version.)

How can I get voice synthesis for my Ultralingua dictionary?

Windows: We used to recommend Digalo products for text-to-speech in languages other than English, but Digalo is no longer fully compatible with Ultralingua. Currently, then, unfortunately we have no solution for English voice synthesis in Ultralingua for Windows.

Macintosh: If you want English voice synthesis on Mac Classic, all you need is Apple's PlainTalk extensions, which should have come with your system. If you don't have them, you can check with Apple. Mac OS X comes standard with the Speech Manager. However, there is currently no Apple or third party solution for speech synthesis in languages other than English.

Where do the Ultralingua databases come from?

Most Ultralingua databases are developed by our team of language experts; certain specialized databases come from major publishing houses which have asked us to handle the electronic versions of their dictionaries. Virtually all databases are in constant evolution, most of them adding thousands of entries every year.

Lexical corpora (principal authors only):

French-English: Scott Carpenter; Spanish-English; Leland Guyer, Gleb Beliakov; French-English Medical data: Masson, S.A.; German-English: Chris Carter-Smith, Friederike von Schwerin-High; French-Spanish; Daniel Zamorano; French-German: Chris Carter-Smith, Ultralingua; Norwegian-English: Kunnskapsforlaget; Italian-English: Dario de Judicibus; Portuguese-English: Marcelo Todaro, Luciana Ginezi; German-Spanish: Jan-Mark Kunberger, Yvonne Ganswig; Latin-English: with thanks to Jason Davies; French monolingual: Jean-Pierre BrulÈ, Roland Laniel, Scott Carpenter; Roland Laniel, English Dictionary & Thesaurus: Scott Carpenter, WordNet 1.6 (heavily edited) WordNet 1.6 Copyright © 1997 by Princeton University (WordNet required notice: All rights reserved. This software and database is provided "as is" and Princeton University makes no representations or warrangties, express or implied. By way of example, but not limitation, Princeton University makes no representations or warranties of mechantability or fitness for any particular purpose or that the use of the licensed software, database or documentation will not infringe any third party patents, copyrights, trademarks or other rights.), pronunciation guide inspired in part by The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary, Copyright 1998 by Carnegie Mellon University.