Collins Dictionaries

User Guide

Art.code 70509.350 - English Version 1.4 - 1999

Introduction

Collins Dictionaries are widely acclaimed for their excellence, for their continuing innovation and for their tireless reflection of today’s language.

Today the innovation continues with the arrival of a truly pocketable version of the most easy-to-use and up-to-date dictionary for your Psion Series 5 by Palmtop.

The German, French, Italian and Spanish package include:

- the Collins Paperback edition
  with over 100,000 translations and 70,000 references and a wide coverage in areas relevant to business and office automation

The German and French package also include:

- Collins Easy Learning Dictionary
.
over 34,000 translations and 32,000 words and phrases to make it easy for new learners to understand the correct use of the language.

This manual aims to cover the language versions.

The Collins Dictionary by Palmtop is in fact a hypertext system. Should the translation contain a word you do not understand just click on it to find the meaning of that word. In this way you can immediately switch to and fro between the target and source language.

How to use the dictionary

F

igure 1 Example.

The Title Bar

The title bar shows information about the rest of the screen. In figure 1, for example, it shows the current key word ("Pleased"), and the current dictionary ("English-German"). In general, you can use your pen on any of these items. For instance, clicking on the name of the dictionary will take you to the mirror dictionary (in this case, the German-English dictionary), whilst clicking on the current key word will activate the ‘Find’ option.

The Toolbar

Like all applications on the Series 5, the Collins Dictionary offers a toolbar containing some often-used menu options that you can activate with your pen or finger. If you are left-handed, you may prefer to move it to the left (using the "Left-handed toolbar" menu option). It can also be hidden (using the "Show toolbar" menu option), so that you have more room available for the dictionary text.

Switching dictionaries

To switch dictionaries, you can use one of the following options:

- click on a translation in the dictionary text;
- click on the dictionary name in the title;
- press the TAB key;
- click on the "View" button on the toolbar;
- select the "Switch view" option from the menu.

Finding words

To find a word in your dictionary: simply start typing it! A few letters usually suffice to find the word you are looking for.

Note: A sophisticated timing mechanism is constantly making intelligent guesses about the characters you type. If you wait more than about 1.5 seconds before typing a character, the application will assume you wish to find another word, and forget the previous characters you typed. If for some reason you are not able to type characters fast enough, use the "Find" option from the menu or the toolbar.

You do not have to bother about capitals or accents, nor about spaces, hyphens and quotes.

- To find "Çà" in the French dictionary, simply type "ca".
- To find "shouldn't" in the English dictionary, type "shouldnt".
- To find "überhaupt" in the German dictionary, simply type "uberh".
- To find words containing the letters "ß" or "œ" you can type respectively, "ss" and "oe".

You can also PASTE a word directly into the dictionary screen - it will start searching for a match immediately.

Browsing

Obviously, you can use the arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down, Home and End and the scroll bar to browse through the dictionary text.

The hypertext system means that you can press ENTER (or click) on a highlighted word and immediately go to its dictionary entry, without first having to switch dictionary and then find it.

Back & Forward

The application keeps track of the key words you have recently "visited". You can use the "back" and "forward" options (from the menu or the toolbar) to go back and forth in the history of your use.

Display

You can switch between the full text and just the word list, by either

- Clicking on the "Display" button in the toolbar
- Using the "Display" menu option
- Pressing the SPACEBAR

Note: The Easy Learning edition features an additional display mode with "illustrative" and "essential" phrases.

Figure 2 A screen showing only the key words.

The dictionary text: size, colour and font

As usual, you can use the "zoom in" and "zoom out" options to change the size of the text (either via the menu, by using the hotkeys, or by clicking on the zoom buttons at the left of the Series 5 screen). You can also use the "view preferences" menu option to change the font, and to change the way translations are shown. By default, these are shown in grey. If you do not like this, or have problems with the contrast, you might wish to change this to e.g. black italics.

Making selections

The "Crossword" option

The "Crossword" option is useful for finding crossword solutions. To find a five-letter word starting with "a", ending with "r", and of which you know the third letter should be a "b", type "a?b?r".

It may also come in handy if you don't know the exact spelling, just that it probably starts with "a" and ends with "eu", type "a*eu"

Certain linguistic research, e.g. finding all French words ending in "eaux", can easily be done in a similar way.

Note: You can only use "*" once in a search.

Figure 3 Example in which the "Crossword" option is used to find all words starting with a and containing 'eu' as the penultimate letters.

Figure 4 All the words selected as a result of the operation described in Fig. 3.

The "Anagrams" option

The anagrams option is best explained with an example. If, for instance, you type your name, it will scan the dictionary for all the words that can be made out of the letters of your name.

But remember, only key words that are in the dictionary will be found, no conjugations, past tenses etc.

Tagging words in the dictionaries

You can use the TAG and UNTAG to tag words, for whatever reason.

You can also use the TAG ALL and UNTAG ALL, which may be especially useful if you have made a selection first.

Example: find all words ending in "eau" (using *eau in crossword), tag all that are found, then find all words ending in "aux", tag these as well, then use the "select all tagged words".

Selecting the tagged words

This option will switch between the normal dictionary text and the selection of tagged entries.

Aborting a selection

Most options and actions will abort a selection and return to the full dictionary. You can also press ESCAPE or click on the "selection" text in the title.