Using the French dictinary on your mobile phone

The information on this page is mainly intended for "older" style mobile phones. If you have an iPhone or modern smartphone, you may be more interested in the following:

the normal French dictionary page is designed to adapt to the screen of the iPhone/iPad;
a separate Vocab Games app is also available for iPhone/iPad.

This page gives information about the WAP^* version of this site's French-English dictionary. This special version allows you to use the French dictionary on your mobile phone. To use the mobile phone dictionary, you'll need the following:

A mobile phone that supports WAP. It must support WAP version 1.1 or greater. (In practice, all WAP-enabled mobile phones should support this version.)
The necessary agreement with your mobile phone provider to browse the Internet on your phone. Many contracts nowadays include this, so it's worth just trying the dictionary if you're not sure.
If you are not on a newer GPRS system, your phone may need configuring for Internet access, a bit like a modem. If you got your phone on a contract, it will probably already be configured.

Mobile French dictionary lookup illustrated

* WAP stands for "Wireless Application Protocol". It's basically a fancy way of saying "version of the Internnet for mobile phones".

Using the dictionary on PDAs

Note that the WAP version of the dictionary described here is specifically designed for "normal" mobile phones. Some more sophisticated mobile phones are effectively PDAs with large screens and "full" Internet browsers. On these types of devices, you may be able to run the HTML version of the French dictionary just as on your desktop or laptop.

Accessing the mobile dictionary

To access the mobile phone version of the dictionary, you need to point your phone at the following address:

http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/mobile/fren/

How exactly you access the Internet on your phone is something you may need to check in your manual.

Once you are successfully connected to the above address, you should get a text box into which you type a French word, and a button marked Lookup, which will– yes, you've guessed it– look the word up in the dictionary.

About the mobile version of the dictionary

When accessing a dictionary on your mobile phone, your needs will probably be a bit different to the desktop version. The most likely scenario is that you are out "on the move" and need to understand some French "in an emergency":

getting a rough idea of what the word means is probably more important than locating the exact English translation in a specific circumstance;
the smaller screen on mobile phones means that less information can be presented at once;
some of the features of the standard version of the dictionary, such as examples and explanatory comments, have thus been removed in the mobile version in order to save screen space;
certain grammatical information, such as verb conjugations, has also been removed.

Comments and suggestions

You can leave comments about the mobile dictionary version or suggestions for improvements on the corresponding development blog entry.

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