It looks to me like a problem -- at least initially -- on iOS level, unrelated to Marvin. Do dictionary look-ups work for you now in
other iOS apps?
To download a dictionary in iOS 7, you need to tap not the line with the dictionary name, but the cloud icon on the right. It's quite unintuitive. The download progress is not clearly indicated, either. Your dictionary is only completely downloaded once you see a "delete" icon next to the dictionary name (like a small
x). If you still can't see a small
x next to the dictionary name, but a
circle, or a
cloud icon, then you still haven't finished downloading the dictionary, and dictionary look-ups cannot work for you anywhere in iOS.
By the way, the new dictionaries setup in iOS 7 is much preferable over the older one up until iOS 6, although it is still extremely dumb (as usual for Apple whenever it comes to multi-lingual issues). The internal iOS 7 dictionary now allows you to display a dictionary definition from
several dictionaries at the same time -- such as
both a
definition dictionary, and a
translation dictionary --, which is a huge plus, at least in
theory. I say
theory, because the
range of currently available internal iOS 7 dictionaries (especially translation dictionaries) is still extremely narrow, and there still appears to be no way for you to add your own custom dictionaries. And, all the internal iOS 7 dictionaries still exhibit the
fundamental flaws of earlier iOS dictionaries: all the hyperlinks inside them are completely dead (how Apple is not embarrassed by this, is beyond me); and you cannot
search within dictionaries, cannot define words used in the definitions themselves, etc.
Also, the
German iOS dictionary is
still next to unusable in most contexts -- it fails to look up even the most basic German words if they happen to be
inflected, which, of course, they
will be in most occurrences in book texts. In iOS 7, we now at least know whom we are to blame (besides Apple):
Duden Wissensnetz is the name of the inept German dictionary. I wonder if such a dumb, inefficient dictionary is truly the best that both Apple and Duden could come up with in 2013.
A relief in iOS 7, for me, is the ability to get away from Apple's previous English-English internal dictionary, especially its hair-raisingly amateurish pronunciation indications, selecting the (
British) Oxford English Dictionary as my new default iOS 7 English-English dictionary; it features proper IPA pronunciations for every word. Ideally, there would also be a loudspeaker icon next to each definition, so that you would get to hear the word pronounced out loud!
The above means that in iOS 7, it's no longer true (which was the silly setup in previous iOS versions) that in order to switch your iOS dictionary language to the language of your choice, you
first had to switch the layout of your iOS
keyboard (!) to that language. Now, iOS 7 just pops up the definitions from
all of your downloaded dictionaries, whether the dictionary language matches the language of the text you are reading or not. Again, an extremely inflexible, dumb way of doing it by Apple, but that is
typical; from among the 2 dumb ways of doing it (iOS 7 versus earlier iOS), the current iOS 7 way is slightly less dumb, though still very inflexible and unprofessional.