Dictionary shows wrong language (British English instead of American English)

dictionarylanguagemojave

Under macOS 10.14.4, I've enabled the following dictionaries:

Yet, when I hid ⌃⌘D, I get the results as follows:

I would expect the results to show only American English dictionaries, and not British English.

Best Answer

This seems to be a bug that appears when you're switching languages. I know I had switched from British to American English at some point before.

What you have to do is:

Open Dictionary.app
Go to Preferences
Uncheck all dictionaries
Enable the ones that you need

Now the order is correct, and the British dictionary entries are gone from the results.

Related Solutions

MacOS – the difference between the variant language dictionaries in OS X

Many people have tried to find the files for Apple's spell check dictionaries but I don't recall any successes.

As for the Language tab in Language & Text, it really doesn't have anything to do with spelling as such, although the top item on the list can set the default spell check dictionary in some circumstances. The top item on the list also sets the OS and app language (for the 22 that are available), the default collation order, and the preferred language requested by Safari. The order of the list can determine the app language used if a localization for the top item is not available. The order can also determine whether a Japanese or Chinese font is used for text which is ambiguous in that regard. I think adding an item to the list can sometimes provide additional encodings in Mail app.

MacOS – Spanish to English and English to Spanish dictionary for Dictionary app

The latest MacOS versions already include Spanish dictionaries which can be enabled in preferences in the Dictionary.app (⌘+,).

The answer below is for converting and installing third-party dictionaries from other popular formats.

To create a dictionary for the built-in OS X Dictionary.app you will first need pyglossary to convert to the AppleDict format from the input format which can be ABBYY Lingvo DSL, Babylon BGL, Stardict IFO, etc (see all supported formats).

Once the AppleDict source XML is generated, the Apple Dictionary Development Kit is used to generate the native binary files that the Dictionary.app can use.

Proceed as follows:

Installing dependencies

Install Xcode command line tools:
```
 xcode-select --install
```
Install the Auxiliary Tools for Xcode from https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ — you'll need to login with your iCloud or Apple Developer account. Mount the DMG file by double-clicking it in Finder, and copy the folder Dictionary Development Kit to /Developer/Extras (as root) (or to ~/Developer/Extras as a normal user as pointed out by richard-möhn):
```
 mkdir -p ~/Developer/Extras/
 cp -r '/Volumes/Additional Tools/Utilities/' ~/Developer/Extras
```
Install Python 3 via homebrew (OS X comes with Python 2.x preinstalled):
```
 brew install python3
```

Checkout the pyglossary project:

 mkdir -p ~/projects
 git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ilius/pyglossary.git ~/projects/pyglossary

Install lxml and BeautifulSoup, the parsers that pyglossary depends on:
```
 pip3 install lxml beautifulsoup4
```

Now everything is ready to do the actual conversion.

Performing the Conversion

Convert the source dictionary (in this case Babylon BGL) to AppleDict:

 python3 pyglossary.pyw --read-options=resPath=OtherResources --write-format=AppleDict webster.bgl webster.xml

^{NOTE: This operation can take significant time if the dictionary is big.}

Compile the generated AppleDict sources to OS X Dictionary.app binary files. Pyglossary creates the AppleDict sources in a subfolder named the same as the source file.

^{OPTIONAL: By default the dictionary name will be derived from the file name of the input file. If you want to modify the name to something else then open Makefile in a text editor, and set the title in the DICT_NAME variable (make sure you include the quotes).}

    cd webster ### subdir name is derived from the source file
    make
    make install

^{NOTE: make can take significant time if the dictionary is big. For huge dictionaries it can take over 10 minutes.}

make install copies the generated dictionary to ~/Library/Dictionaries. Now if you restart the dictionary app and and open preferences (⌘+,) the new dictionary will appear in the list. Click the checkbox to enable it.

Other formats, for example ABBYY Lingvo DSL require more steps such as re-encoding from UTF-16 to UTF-8. Here is a wrapper script for DSL to AppleDict conversion.

Here are some Free dictionaries in Babylon BGL format. There are also literally hundreds of dictionaries available in DICTD, Stardict and ABBYY Lingvo DSL formats.