Sources

Dictionary management dialog can be opened via menu Edit -> Dictionaries.

To use local dictionaries, add them via Sources -> Files.

To inspect or disable individual dictionaries, go Edit -> Dictionaries -> Dictionaries.

If you have too many dictionaries, consider using Groups to manage them.

Files

Dict File Tab

Here you can add local dictionaries.

Press the "Add" button and select folders that include your local dictionaries. To search every subfolder, enable the "Recursive":

GoldenDict will scan these folders and add found dictionaries to the dictionaries list.

The "Rescan" button starts a forced scan of all folders in the list.

Sound Dirs

Similar to Files, you can either add a folder which contains sound files or a .zip archive which contains the sound files.

GD will search through the sound file names when querying words.

Morphology

A word could have several forms, but sometimes a dictionary only contains one form that could not be found unless you search the normalized form.

Morphology dictionary uses Hunspell's morphological analysis to obtain word's variant forms.

You can specify a path that includes Hunspell format data files (.aff + .dic). GoldenDict will scan this folder and create a list of available dictionaries.

One possible source of Hunspell dictionaries is LibreOffice's dictionaries.

The detailed document about the affix file (.aff) and the dict file (.dic) can be found at hunspell.5.

Note that lots of Hunspell's dictionaries are for mostly for spell checking, and they may lack special morphological rules (For example, related words don't share the same stem in .dic file). There are some specially tailored hunspell dicts to use for Morphology. Such as

Websites

Here you can add any website that allows you to specify the query word in the URL. To add a site, provide its URL using one of the placeholders below, give it a name for the dictionary list, and check the "Enabled" column. You can also set a custom icon in the "Icon" column.If you add an icon file name without a path, GoldenDict will search for this file in the configuration folder.

The query word can be inserted into the URL using the following placeholders:

Target word template	Encoding
%GDWORD%	UTF-8

DICT servers

Here you can add servers which use the DICT protocol. To add such a server, you should set its URL, name for the dictionaries list, server bases list, search strategies list, and set a mark in the "Enabled" column. If the bases list is empty, GoldenDict will use all server bases. If the search strategies list is empty, GoldenDict will use the "prefix" strategy (comparing the first part of the word).

In the "Icon" column you can set custom icon for every server. If you add icon file name without path GoldenDict will search this file in configuration folder.

Programs

Here you can add external applications. To add such an application, you should set the command line for its launch, name for the dictionary list and application type.

The %GDWORD% in command line will be replaced by word from search line.

Program type	Purpose
Audio	Play sound.
Text	Text printed by the program will be shown as separate article.
HTML	HTML printed by the program will be shown as separate article.
Prefix match	A list of words printed by the program will be added to search bar's completion list.

Other than "Audio", the program should print the content to standard output.

In the "Icon" column, you can set a custom icon for every application. If you add icon file name without a path, GoldenDict will search this file in the configuration folder.

Note

The word will be written to stdin in UTF-8 if the command line doesn't contain %GDWORD%.

In rare situations on Windows, some programs may not read stdin as UTF-8. In this case, you need to do some adjustments.

For Python3.6+, reading stdin as UTF-8 is the default behaviour. For older versions, you may need to change PYTHONIOENCODING.

For Node.js, try process.stdin.setEncoding('utf8');.

If you cannot change how your language handles stdin's encoding, try store the data read from the stdin as bytes and call related methods that interpret bytes as UTF-8 strings.

If you cannot access the source code, try enable "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support." in Windows settings.

Transliteration

Here you can add transliteration algorithms. To add an algorithm to the dictionaries list, just set a mark beside it. When such a dictionary is added to the current dictionaries group, GoldenDict will search for the word in the input line as well as the result of its handling by the corresponding transliteration algorithm.

System Text-to-speech engines

Its capability is provided via Qt Speech.

On Windows & macOS, the system provides sounds.

On Linux, speech-dispatcher and flite are the backends.