Kindle Dictionary

One of the great features of Amazon Kindle is instant dictionary lookup. If while reading you encounter a word that you don’t know (like agio), you can just select it with 5-way controller (or scroll-wheel on first generation Kindle) and short definition will popup at the top or bottom of the page. For a longer explanation you can press the “Enter” key. You can then press “Back” to return to the book you were reading.

By default Kindle comes with only Oxford dictionary of English but you can download more dictionaries and use them for look up too. These can be dictionaries with definitions or translation dictionaries. Only one dictionary can be active at any given time though. So you will need to change you dictionary following these simple steps:

From Kindle Home screen press “Menu” and select “Settings”
In the settings screen press “Menu” button again and select “Change Primary Dictionary”
In the screen that lists all available dictionaries select the one you wan to use with 5-way controller.

You can always go back to the original dictionary using the same steps. It is not deleted.

Below is the list of different translation dictionaries for Amazon Kindle:

Kindle English-German Translation Dictionary

145 thoughts on “Kindle Dictionary”

Fernando Vajá says:
November 22, 2010 at 6:31 am

Hello

First of all, congratulations for your work in offering dictionaries for the Kindle. I would like to put 3 questions:

1 – do your dictionaries just work with the Kindle or one can use tem in other ebooks readers who can accept mobipocket ebooks and dictionaries (example the Bookeen ones);

2 – do you intent to offer a Portuguese to English translation dictionary?

3 – do you intent to offer a full Portuguese dictionary?

Note: I’m supposing the Portuguese dictionary you are offering is for European Portuguese (thus the flag…), so my other questions are restricted to that option too.

Best regards,
William Casey says:
November 22, 2010 at 7:36 am

May I express the hope that a Latin dictionary will soon be available?
Seb Hen says:
November 24, 2010 at 2:31 pm

Do these dictionaries only work on English texts, translating English words into the foreign language, or do they also show English translations when selecting a word in a foreign language text?
admin says:
November 24, 2010 at 9:03 pm

Seb,
So far they only translate from English. We’re working on dictionaries that will translate form other languages to English
Luigi says:
November 26, 2010 at 11:21 am

Should be great to have the same search feature build in the default kindle dictionary even on these dictionaries. It’s really useful when the dictionary is launched from the “Home”.

Anyway, congrats for the great work!
Ted says:
November 28, 2010 at 8:11 am

Please make a Latin Dictionary. I know that there is an open source file for the Lewis and Short and some data on the following website: http://www.quasillum.com/software/unicorn.htm

Thanks much!
Maarten Daams says:
December 11, 2010 at 6:00 am

I bought a Spanish translation dictionary for the Kindle. It’s pretty good (usually when you put the cursor next to a conjugated verb, it manages to figure out what the verb is). One drawback is when there is a word like “se” or “lo” at the end of the verb, then you have to type in the verb. There are also French and German dictionaries, all very affordable.
Maarten Daams says:
December 11, 2010 at 6:01 am

P.S. Bought this from Amazon.
Trevor Opolis says:
December 12, 2010 at 10:53 pm

Hi there, approximately how far off are Italian/Spanish/French to English dictionaries?
I am going to buy a Kindle but I am not sure whether to wait for proper dictionaries!
thanks
Trevor
Marko says:
December 13, 2010 at 5:57 pm

Hi

I just bought the English-Croatian dictionary. It looks good, but I have one problem. The quick lookup feature (the short one, appearing at the bottom of the page) is not showing all Croatian “special” letters correctly (it shows empty space instead). It is not showing “č”, “ć” and “đ”. The other special ones (“š” and “ž”) are working.
When I open the dictionary on the whole page (just press “Enter” from that short description), all letters appear OK.
Could you please advise on any solution for this problem? BTW, I own a Kindle DX Graphite.

Thanks

Marko
Kindle Guy says:
December 14, 2010 at 10:06 am

Marko,

I guess that you have 2nd generation Kindle. It unfortunately lacks these characters in some of the fonts. You can either install Unicode Font Hack that is hosted here on this website or upgrade to Kindle 3 that properly supports unicode.
Marko says:
December 14, 2010 at 12:54 pm

Kindle Guy,

Yes, Kindle DX Graphite is 2nd generation Kindle (unfortunately, even though it is the latest large size Kindle).
However, this edition is still not mentioned in your Unicode Font Hack page (it has a serial number starting with B0009). I could not find any answer in the comments also. Do you expect to have Unicode downloads for this edition soon, or should the files for some earlier edition (like i.e. B0005) be used?

I hope you understand me. It’s better to ask 3 times before doing any “at your own risk” action…
Maarten says:
December 25, 2010 at 3:14 pm

I ordered my girlfriend a Kindle. She is italian, I am dutch. We would be very happy with a dutch-italian dictionary, but for starters a dutch-english would do.
Thank you
Laura B says:
December 26, 2010 at 10:15 am

Latin (Lewis and Short? or OLD) and Classical Greek (Liddell and Scott?)dictionaries for Kindle would MAKE MY LIFE.
Ed says:
January 2, 2011 at 8:21 am

Will a (modern) Greek-to-English dictionary become available at some point? What about Greek-to-Greek?
Zezette P says:
January 17, 2011 at 1:38 pm

Hi: I downloaded the english-french dictionary and the speech-to-text was not enabled as promised. Will the fix come soon? Thanks!
Sammy Ng says:
January 17, 2011 at 3:26 pm

Are there English-Chinese dictionaries for Kindle.
I have used Oxford Advanced Learner Dictionary English to Chinese for many years. It is by far the best I found for English to Chinese translation.

I would love to have one in kindle version as well.
Zezette P says:
January 17, 2011 at 4:07 pm

Sorry! I meant text-to-speech… I look forward to it because I really liked the dictionary.
RPManchester says:
January 19, 2011 at 4:04 pm

I am student of Italian and it would be so good if I could use an Italian to English dictionary on Kindle. Does anyone know when this is likely to be agailable?
Chia-Hsiang Chu says:
January 21, 2011 at 5:22 am

is there any Chinese to English (Not English to Chinese) dictionaries available or any other way to look up Chinese characters easily?
Pla says:
January 24, 2011 at 12:21 pm

Hi:

I’d like to know which are the next dictionaries to be released.
David Marshall says:
January 26, 2011 at 5:36 pm

I love the embedded dictionary lookup.
I would like to be able to save definitions in a vocabulary list that lives in a separate document on the kindle. About all I’ve been able to do is look stuff up in the dictionary and then highlight the text which then gets saved in My Clippings.

So if I’m reading a book and find a cool word and want to save the definition AND the sentence(s) that contain the word it would be nice if there were a way to do this and have it save to a My Vocabulary Builder or some such document.

I’d then want to be able to open the My Vocabulary Builder document and edit it (perhaps deleting entries)

Does Amazon do all the programming for Kindle or are people building apps for these things?
Chris says:
January 30, 2011 at 2:26 am

I hope you will offer a version of the English-Russian dictionary using cyrillics rather than the latin alphabet. Is there any hope of sucha version? Any idea of timescale?
NSZ says:
February 1, 2011 at 3:53 pm

Here http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1274289&postcount=5 you said that there was an attempt to publish a greek-english dictionary but it was only functional on K3. Well is there a way for the owners of K3 to get this experimental dictionary? It’d sure come in handy until you release a full version, that supports all Kindles.
Gabe says:
February 11, 2011 at 1:40 pm

Is there any chance that an English-Hungarian dictionary will soon be available? That would make my kindle just perfect!
Pablo says:
February 18, 2011 at 9:43 am

These are translators dictionaries.
What I want is to replace the default english dictionary lookup for a spanish one.
Is it possible?
Thx
Lukman says:
February 20, 2011 at 12:51 pm

Hi Admin
On your example above that it is possible to change other Primary Dictionary like
Rusian, Germany etc.
How do I upgrade my Kindle like above ? Should I purchase it ? Or those Dictionary as part of Kindle Package for Kindle device buyer. (I wish :) )
I ve got this link “English Indonesian Dictionary for Kindle ” http://www.amazon.com/English-Indonesian-Dictionary-ebook/dp/B0034KYSZG ..
How do I get it ? How do I put on my Kindle 3 Wifi ?
Many Thanks.
I really love my Kindle as just my only e-book reader now.
Dónall says:
February 21, 2011 at 1:34 pm

Hi

I would like to take up the point raised by Pablo but on behalf of Irish. Ideally an Irish-Irish dictionary would be of great benefit but an Irish-English dictionary would be a superb interim step. Any indication of either of these are in the offing?

le dea-ghuí

Dónall
AiRLAC says:
February 24, 2011 at 4:10 am

Gabe

Hungarian dictionary is here:
http://ekonyvolvaso.blog.hu/2010/10/02/derult_egbol_mobi_szotar
Rhetor says:
February 26, 2011 at 6:41 am

I, too, would like to see a Latin – English Kindle default dictionary.
Vassilis says:
March 2, 2011 at 5:15 am

Hi,

It would be very convinient for me to have an english – greek dictionary suitable for kindle, since greek is my mother’s tongue.
Thank you
Vassilis
Daan says:
March 2, 2011 at 2:42 pm

I’d like to join Maarten’s request.
It would be extremely helpful if you’ll issue a Dutch – English dictionary.
thanks
Hans says:
March 7, 2011 at 2:35 pm

All fair, these requests for translating dictionaries, but can you actually have a non-English primary dictionary yet? Even if it were just French-French, Italian-Italian, etc. (after all, most non-native speakers will know enough of the language they’re trying to read).
It seems like most posts here are talking about dictionaries as books, rather than assistance in the books they’re reading…
Joselyn says:
March 8, 2011 at 5:34 pm

I got an Amazon Kindle 2, and I was wondering if I can connect it to my home wifi. Plus, I live outside USA. I also want to download the Kindle English-Spanish Translation Dictionary, how can I do it?
THANKS
Lanek says:
March 9, 2011 at 7:25 am

Hi, I would appreciate a lot greek – english dictionary :-)

Many thanks!
Henrique says:
March 12, 2011 at 8:08 am

Hi,

I would be great to have a portuguese-portuguese dicitionary, not a translator version.

Thanx.
Cristian says:
March 18, 2011 at 12:23 am

I need a Catalan dictionary for my kindle dx.
Thank you very much!
Shirley says:
March 24, 2011 at 12:14 am

I’m looking for Italian-English dictionary, is there one around?
Thanks!
Olga says:
March 30, 2011 at 11:27 am

Would love an english – dutch dictionary
Mike says:
April 2, 2011 at 2:47 pm

Has anyone experienced problems changing the default dictionary with the Spanish-English dictionary with Kindle version 3.1? The screenshots above reflect Kindle Version 3.0.1 vs. what’s now available at http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_navbox_top_kindlelgi?nodeId=200529700 … I own the Kindle (latest version.)

I’ve tried the setup instructions from the dictionary’s first page – moving the cursor next to words still displays the default Oxford dictionary.
Andrei Pushkin says:
April 7, 2011 at 4:54 pm

Mike,

it is a known problem that seems to be related to the book you are trying to read (it works for some, but not others). We’re working on resolving this issue.
Milan says:
April 11, 2011 at 11:09 am

Andrei,

I have experienced similar problem with German-English Dictionary. The behavior is the same as it was described by Mike. Are you going to fix this issue?

Thanks
Charles MacLachlan says:
April 16, 2011 at 9:43 am

I bought and downloaded the Italian-English dictionary from Amazon because I wanted to be able to look up Italian words as I read. Although I have made it the default dictionary it does not work: whenever I move the cursor to a word the Oxford English dictionary tries to give me the meaning – if it can recognise the word as an English one.

The Italian dictionary is listed and can be used as a stand-alone dictionary, and it is highlighted as the default dictionary under the Settings, but it does not work with the cursor although it is advertised as doing so.

Am I missing something?
Milan says:
April 18, 2011 at 3:32 am

Andrei,

I noticed the same problem with German-English dictionary, are you going to fix this problem too?
Thanks
Nathan says:
April 19, 2011 at 11:00 am

When will you be offering your Portuguese->English dictionary, I see that recently you have released some others that translate FROM a language TO English
Peter says:
April 22, 2011 at 11:59 am

I’m having the same problem with the Italian-English dictionary as Charles. When and how are we going to get a fix – or do i need to go back to Amazon and request a refund?
Aiden says:
April 23, 2011 at 12:12 pm

How do you do this on the iPad kindle app ?
Daniel says:
April 25, 2011 at 11:29 pm

Is there any English-Chinese dictionary ??
Thanks
Hristina says:
April 29, 2011 at 1:04 am

i bought german-english dictionary but it doesnt work as a default one.What do i need to do?Thanks
Peter says:
April 30, 2011 at 4:05 pm

Can someone please give us an update on whether the problem with using the dictionaries as the default one is going to be resolved or not. And if it is, when.