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Most Ultralingua dictionaries are developed and maintained by our team of language experts. Certain specialized databases come from other major publishing houses that have asked us to develop the electronic versions of their dictionaries. Many of our dictionaries receive updates and new entries every year.

In addition to maintaining our own dictionaries, we also license dictionary data from well-known publishers like HarperCollins, Vox, and Simon & Schuster.

The basic technology behind the dictionaries (for look-up, display, verb conjugation, number-to-text conversion) is nearly identical. The single greatest difference is the dictionary data itself, and the decision of which to use is a matter personal preference. Collins entries are often enriched with more indications of context and examples of usage, while Ultralingua dictionaries often include a higher quantity of entries.

You can download a completely free 10-day trial of each for Mac or Windows to try them each for yourself before making a purchase decision. Just visit our product page and click the download link for the dictionaries you wish to try.

If you’re looking for a summary, here are some quick general guidelines:

• Most of our bilingual dictionaries contain approximately 200,000 - 300,000 translations for about 50,000 – 100,000 entries.
• Our monolingual English dictionary contains 300,000 definitions for more than 85,000 headwords, with more than 65,000 entries in the thesaurus.
• Our verb conjugators contain conjugations for most known verbs in each language (usually some 6000-7000 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.

Dictionary makers have different ways of counting the content in their data, so it’s important to be careful when comparing numbers in product descriptions from different publishers. The number of "entries" is sometimes inflated by counting extra things or by counting some parts of the dictionary multiple times.

At Ultralingua, we quantify our dictionary content by looking at the headwords and definitions associated with each “entry”. We describe the number of “entries” as the number of individual terms or headwords you could look up in the dictionary, and “translations” or “definitions” as the number of meanings or senses provided with the headwords.

For example, “boat” (noun) in our Spanish-English Dictionary has seven translations, because there are many different ways to say “boat” in Spanish depending on the context or type of boat you are looking to describe. “Boat” (verb) has another eight possible translations.

Here we have two entries (boat, noun; boat, verb) with a total of fifteen translations. These contribute to the total 75,000 entries and 290,000 translations in the Spanish-English Dictionary & Verbs by Ultralingua.

You can view a full list of the number of entries in our dictionaries on our product page.

Legacy versions are former versions of our software, like Ultralingua for Mac and Windows versions 6, 5, and 4, which are no longer available for sale. If you use an old version of Ultralingua and do not wish to upgrade you may need legacy version support.

We’ve created a tool that allows you to automatically re-download your legacy version. Simply enter your license key into our download link generator to receive a direct link to your product.

The instructions provided here for Ultralingua dictionaries will almost certainly pertain to our Collins products, too. If you have questions about the content of the Collins dictionaries, please contact Collins directly at support@collinsdictionaries.com. If you have technical support questions not answered here, contact us via email.

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).

Most people do not need to buy Ultralingua on an actual CD. The most current versions of our products can be always downloaded from our website. Once you have selected the Ultralingua products you want to buy, a Backup CD option will be available in the shopping cart. This provides a copy of each Ultralingua product in your order.

Ultralingua is distributed by Nexway and Tribeka in the United States and Europe. You’ll find Ultralingua on shelves and in kiosks at stores such as Carrefour, Harvey Norman, Tesco, Microsoft, and Sony Style.

The Upgrade dictionaries are intended for customers who wish to change from an older version number to the newest version number of the same dictionary.

For example, if you own version 6.x Ultralingua French-English Dictionary (Mac) and wish to purchase the new version 7.x Ultralingua French-English Dictionary (Mac), you may do so at the discounted price by purchasing an upgrade key. Upgrade pricing does not apply if you want a different dictionary or a dictionary for another platform.

To upgrade to the most recent major version of our software, simply download and install the newest version directly from the website as a free trial. You can then purchase a discounted registration key from our website by selecting the “upgrade pricing option” before putting the product in your shopping cart. Minor updates within a major version (7.0 to 7.1, for example) are free and automatic.