A small, seldom received, praise for the Kobo dictionary

[the.Mtn.Man]

Originally Posted by geek1011

If you want an even better dictionary (albeit lacking in modern words), try my converted Webster's 1913 Unabridged Dictionary. It's surprisingly complete, and the definitions and examples are excellent.

Pretty sure that's the one I have installed, which is really helpful because the vast majority of my ebook collection is older titles that are in the public domain and therefore freely available, and having a dictionary that is closer in time to the books I'm reading means it's more likely to have unfamiliar words that have fallen out of common usage.

[jmmcg9]

Jackie_W,
I tried your method for renaming and adding the file to my \.kobo\dict folder. The “English-English” dictionary is available by the pull down menu, but when I select it I get the message “1 dictionary download pending; sync to install”. Rebooting the device didn’t seem to help.
Any ideas how to resolve this?
Update, I solved my own problem. If I don’t add the .zip on the end of the file when renaming it works. Also The iMac ( running Catalina) wouldn’t let me eject the reader without doing a Kobo sync. I did that through the web app and noticed it gave a message “loading dictionary”.
FYI I got lucky testing, by choosing “Visa”. It is not in the Kobo default dictionary, but was in the Webster 1913 dictionary. I didn’t know Visas were around in 1913!

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by jmmcg9

Jackie_W,
I tried your method for renaming and adding the file to my \.kobo\dict folder. The “English-English” dictionary is available by the pull down menu, but when I select it I get the message “1 dictionary download pending; sync to install”. Rebooting the device didn’t seem to help.
Any ideas how to resolve this?

Not really. I never saw anything like this problem myself. I've never used the wi-fi feature, though, so maybe that makes a difference?

A couple of things you could look at:

What happens if you do the sync it's requesting?

Which other dictionary .zip files are present in the \.kobo\dict folder?
Are there any there that you don't need?
For comparison purposes, this is a list of the only official Kobo dictionaries I keep on my own devices:

dicthtml.zip
dicthtml-de-en.zip
dicthtml-es-en.zip
dicthtml-fr-en.zip
dicthtml-it-en.zip
dicthtml-pt-en.zip

i.e. basically the English plus all the other_language-to-English translation dictionaries.

I was able to add dicthtml-en-en.zip to the above list without any problems.

ETA: Obviously, I wasn't quick enough

[jmmcg9]

Jackie_W,
It worked when I renamed the file without.zip on the end. I am guessing that it already had the “hidden” “.zip” extension, so I probably had .zip.zip on the end.
Thanks, Joe