Running Merriam Webster Dictionary on Linux

I brought a merriam webster dictionary for about 26 USD, a nice english dictionary with a bonus CD containing the entire dictionary in electronic form. Too bad the CD is only for Windows, i couldn't install it on Linux using Wine (maybe you could if you tweak the DLL settings, but i'm too lazy to do that).

While i was trying Wine, i tried to run the installed Merriam Webster dictionary residing in my Windows partition, and to my surprise: it works, but the font (for phonetic display) is different, after looking around i found out that the dictionary is adding some fonts to Windows, it all starts with the letter mw, so i just copied the font to Linux, and it works.

This is how i do it

This is the step by step guide to run the dictionary in Linux:

  1. Install the merriam webster dictionary in Windows (e.g at c:\program files\Merriam Webster)
  2. If you are affraid that you might do some harm to your installed Merriam Webster, copy the Merriam Webster folder somewhere else (I copied mine to /data/Merriam-Webster/)
  3. Copy the Merriam Webster font files on your Windows FONTS directory (usually it is C:\WINDOWS\FONTS or C:\WINNT\FONTS) to your Linux font directory (it depends on your distribution, mine is at /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/), the name of the font files starts with mw (mwextreg.ttf, mwipareg.ttf, mwreg.ttf, and mwspecia.ttf).
  4. Find msvcrt.dll on you Windows folder, and copy it to the same folder as the Merriam Webster dictionary
  5. Write the following batch file and name it dict.sh (replace /data/Merriam-Webster with your path to installed Merriam-Webster)

    6. #!/bin/sh
export WINEDEBUG=warn-all,fixme-all
export WINEDLLOVERRIDES="msvcrt=n"
cd /data/Merriam-Webster
wine ./merriam-webster.exe

  6. You can add dict.sh to your path and type dict.shto run the dictionary (or just type ./dict.sh from where the script resides.)

Note:Some menu will make the application crash, but if you only use it to search for definition (including the pictures) and copy the text, it will work just file

Screenshoot

Merriam Webster Dictionary on Linux

The font looks OK

Link to online merriam webster dictionary http://m-w.org/