Add more Wikipedia languages to your Mac OS X Dictionary

by Aleksejs

If you look in Mac OS X Dictionary Preferences, you can notice that Dictionary supports Wikipedia in many languages, but there are not all languages in which Wikipedia is available. But there is some little solution for this, if you want to use your Dictionary for browsing Wikipedia in your language, e.g., in Latvian.

Here is an instruction, how to add Latvian, but a procedure is similar for another languages:

  1. Close Dictionary, if the application is open.
  2. Open TextEdit.
  3. Press ⌘O, tad ⌘⇧G, paste /Applications​/Dictionary.app​/Contents​/Resources​/Wikipedia.privatedictionary​/Contents​/Resources​/Wikipedia_prefs.plistCopy, open.
  4. Paste under <dict>: Screenshot
    <key>language-lv</key>
    <string>0</string>
  5. Save.
  6. Open Dictionary and go to Preferences, where now is available Latvian. Screenshot

In such way you can add another languages too, you only need to know a language code (ISO 639-1).

You can this tip to select more languages from Other Languages list.

Note. It’s possible that some update will override these changes. So you will need to do it again.

Another note. It’s tested only on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.