Add Your Local Language Dictionary to iPhone
October 25th, 2007
1.You must install weDict first by either iBrickr or Installer.
2.Then download the dictionary in your language from startdict.
For me, I downloaded the oxford-gb dictionary(en - zh_CN) 牛津现代英汉双解词典(click to download). And the file I got is stardict-oxford-gb-2.4.2.tar.bz2.
3.Now unzip the .bz2 file by winrar, which is the one I take, or any other uncompress software you prefer.
Three files extracted: oxford-gb.idx, oxford-gb.ifo,oxford-gb.dict.dz.
4.Re-unzip the .dz file by the freeware 7zip to a .dict one. WinRar can’t do this for you.
5.Copy the .idx and .dict files to iPhone’s /var/root/Library/weDict/ by WinSCP or Putty.
6.Launch weDict and enjoy! 
Update: for the most recent weDict version 0.5, in order to make the newly added dictionary work, you have to manually choose the dictionary first(which is not necessary in the previous version).You can get it by checking the following picture out.
One more thing,if you use WinScp to copy the dict files to iPhone, make sure you copy them to the right place, because WinScp’s default folder for iphone is very similar to the right folder. Again, see the picture, please.
Update(Feb 12,2008): If you are in firmware 1.1.3 and weDict can’t work any more, you may check out George’s fix as quoted below. There’s lots of other fixes here.
weDict stores the dictionary index cache in /var/root/Library/weDict, if for some reason this folder was not created (which is my case), apply the following fix:
mkdir /var/mobile/Library/weDict chown mobile /var/mobile/Library/weDict ln -s /var/mobile/Library/weDict /var/root/Library/.
Update(Jul.10,2008): I’ve uploaded the oxford ready-for-iphone dict files here(click to download). Download and unzip it to your local disk, then copy the two dict files to the right folder on the phone. Launch wedict and enjoy.
January 6th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
[...] 1.iCosta - the first native and system level Chinese input method. Absolutely No.1. 2.Installer - The one which makes the installation of following native apps pretty straightforward. A must, too. 3.MobileFinder - The first file system explorer and management tool. For me, most likely it works as kinda launcher 4.rSBT - The tool I used to re-arrange my springboard. Yes, i know SummerBoard. but I still prefer this one due to its simplicity and less resource requirement. 5.SMSD - Almost replaced my default SMS.app. And the author is keeping on working to make it better. I’ve talked it before. 6.Books - The ebook reader. Absolutely one of the first 3rd party native apps for iphone. 7.SwirlyMMS - The first and only MMS app for iphone until now. Even though it’s still lack of some key features like MMS receiving, it’s still worth to be in the list. And the feeling is great when I send the pictures to my friends successfully. 8.ScreenShot - A screen capture tool with GUI. Most of the pictures in this site are created by it, except the very early ones by the command tool. 9.TuneWiki - Lyrics showing while listening music. Very impressive, not only for its functions, but also for its idea of syncing lyrics by taking full use of the community. Only one thing, when can i see some Chinese song’s lyrics? 10.weDict - Dictionary, esp. for people whose mother language is not english. If you wanna know how to add your local dictionaries to weDict, read my previous post here. [...]
March 22nd, 2008 at 10:57 am
I have loaded my dictionaries but they do not appear in WeDict anywhere. I am running 1.1.4 on the iPhone, and v0.9 of Wedict. Is there something I have to do to activate the dictionaries once they’re on the phone?
March 23rd, 2008 at 10:02 pm
I’m not sure if you’ve been copying the dictionary files to the right place. But if you did(you should be able to see them listed there in the screen of ‘weDict settings’), there’s no need to activate any more, at least in my case.
good luck.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:18 am
[...] To begin, download the English-Korean files from Stardict. They’ll be in a tarball, so if you haven’t got Linux, you’ll need a good zip program that can unzip the formats involved. On Linux, there is dictzip program you can get especially for this; otherwise, other archiving programs will do the job. I believer you can rename the *.dict.dz file to *.dict.gz to unzip. More instructions are here and here. [...]
July 9th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
I tried downloading the oxford gb-english dictionary but looks like it has been removed from that place. if you have a copy of the same, can you share it on this site.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Please see my update in the end of this post.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Thanks a lot Cui
July 21st, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Hey,
I had used PCSuite before and i think it automatically installed WeDict w/ a Chinese/English dictionary… but when I (accidentally) upgraded to 2.0 then back down to 1.1.4… I lost it…
I tried to reinstall the WeDict using the former way, but it didn’t work… So, I manually installed WeDict and followed you directions for installing dictionaries… BUT I don’t have that directorary on my iPhone… I created a new folder in the proper place, but the dictionaries which I manually added don’t show up in WeDict when I open it… any ideas?
July 21st, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Update…
I got it to work! I guess for 1.1.4 you need to paste the dictionary files into the mobile folder: private>var>mobile>Library>weDict… and it’ll work
But, my next question is: What’s the best English to Chinese dictionary? I’d love to find one that could show the pin yin because I’m trying to learn Chinese now and by just giving me the English and the Chinese character, I still don’t know how to pronounce it in Chinese… Any advice/suggestions would be wonderful!
July 29th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Hey I got a new iPhone3g, does anything like this work for iPhone 2.0 software for just adding a few slang words like to and company names like where I work?
July 30th, 2008 at 9:52 am
chris, i myself haven’t tried wedict on 2.0 yet. but i do see it’s listed in the App Store,which means wedict has been ported to 2.0 and should work fine.
For the dict files part, perhaps the target folder may be a little bit different, now that 2.0 has a different framework from 1.x already.
but it’s just a guess.I’ll check it out later when i’ve got time. Perhaps next week.
July 31st, 2008 at 4:41 am
Cui, install wedict from the app.store (free). Extract all the files as mentione before in this article, the copy the files ending in .dict and .idx into the WeDict.app folder under private/var/mobile/Applications/E9A87E…/WeDict.app
Open WeDict go to settings and enable all the dictionaries you want to use. I have updated to 2.0 and used IXFER for the file transfer under Windows XP.
Works just fine.
July 31st, 2008 at 10:03 am
Thanks, Daniel, for the timely share. BTW, i’ve learned a new SCP client from you as well, IXFER
August 4th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
@Daniel
mmh but if you reboot, or sync, or open iTunes on iPhone, you got an error when you open weDict, coz weDict will verify the files with orginal packaging
August 5th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Same here,
manually adding dictionaries does not work yet. It works till the next restart, then the app won’t start anymore.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
[...] how-to? well, reader Daniel has put it in this comment. All same as before, except the target folder where the .dict and .idx files should be copied to, [...]
August 12th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
@iPhoneBlaze, Daniel is right. I’ve made it myself.Check it out,please.
@Daniel, thanks again