Monier-Williams for Apple’s Dictionary.app

I’ll tell you something the world needs:

A programmer-y person with a linguistic bent, or a language-y person with a computer-y bent, or someone else who might in some ways resemble me but with more free time (or the greater technical skill to diminish the requisite quantity of time), who will take a look at this, scour the web for digital copies of old dictionaries and lexica that are in the public domain, and start cranking out new modules for Apple’s Dictionary.app.

Look, there is no reason why I should not already be able to open Dictionary on my Mac and be able to search at least the Liddell & Scott Greek Lexicon, the Gesenius Hebrew Lexicon, the Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary, and the Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary. In respective unicode fonts, of course. (I mean, obviously: transliteration is for philistines.)

Why can’t I do this yet? We’re not talking flying cars, here; so how about it, Internet? I mean, is this the future or isn’t it? My thumbs are getting tired from all this page flipping.

In the meantime, I took a StarDict version of the Monier-Williams, and ran it through DictUnifier, and came up with this (it’s a doozy at about 40mb — don’t download it frivolously). Unzip it, and put the resultant folder in Macintosh HD >> Users >> YourUserName >> Library >> Dictionaries . If the “Dictionaries” folder doesn’t exist, create it (and make sure to spell it right).

After that, if you open Dictionary.app you should find that you have the Monier-Williams as one of your dictionaries, though it’s not as pretty as it should be (the digitization was apparently made with an old console dictionary application in mind), and it uses the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme (blech).

Anybody know where I can find any sort of unicode Devanagari version? I know I can search online lexica, but it would be nice to have such quick access when offline.