This Thai-English English-Thai dictionary is a piece of software that runs on your Windows PC (desktop, notebook or netbook). You can purchase and download the software directly from this website onto your PC and begin using it immediately. To use the software, you simply run the program and start typing letters of your word. As you enter each letter, the dictionary jumps closer and closer to your word, and typically after only a few letters, you have found your word. Each entry contains English, Thai written using the Thai alphabet, and Thai written using a convenient English-like pronunciation guide. So you can read and search for Thai words even if you don't read Thai script.

We have lots more information about the dictionary on our overview page, including a visual tour of the program, a deeper description of our Search-by-Sound™ feature, which lets you search for Thai words by their sound so that you don't need to read Thai script, as well as the exact requirements for your PC.

You can even download a free, limited trial version of the software that lets you experience the look and feel of the software before you buy.

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Search-by-Sound™ has been a hallmark of all Paiboon dictionaries since 2002.

For more information on Search-by-Sound and why it's so useful for Thai, click here.

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If you don't read Thai script, our dictionary is still just as useful! Every time a Thai word appears, it's written in the Thai alphabet, but also in an easy-to-use, English-like pronunciation guide, so you can read and sound out Thai words without needing to read Thai script. And thanks to our indispensable Search-by-Sound™ feature, you can even find Thai words by their sound without needing to know the Thai alphabet.

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Click the buttons to hear some sample sounds:

Say goodbye to robot voices and limited sound sets: our comprehensive sounds set a new standard in the industry.

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You can always purchase our product using a credit card (Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover/etc.).

If your computer is physically located in the USA, Europe, or most other countries at the time that you purchase our product, then you will be able to directly enter your credit card number and complete your purchase immediately, without needing to provide or create a PayPal account.

However, due to restrictions placed on all vendors by PayPal, if your computer is physically located in Thailand at the time that you purchase our product, then PayPal will require you to create a PayPal account first, and add your credit card to that PayPal account, before you can purchase our product. This is true regardless of whether your credit card was issued by a Thai bank or a non-Thai bank: the key factor is where your computer is physically located at the time of purchase.

Fortunately, it costs you nothing to create and maintain a PayPal account, and once you have created the PayPal account, you can add any credit card or debit account you want to your PayPal account to use for payment.

We apologize for this inconvenience for users based in Thailand: PayPal claims that this is necessary for "fraud prevention," but we fail to see how this is relevant and we feel that PayPal is just taking advantage of the situation in order to get more customers. We have made multiple pleas to PayPal to relax this restriction, but PayPal is adamant. We are currently investigating alternate payment providers who will not impose this restriction on users located in Thailand, but it will take several months to set up alternate systems.

So, if you are in Thailand and you wish to purchase, here are some options that you have:

• Use PayPal, if you already have a PayPal account.

• Create a PayPal account and add your credit card to it. You can then pay with your credit card.

• Ask a trusted friend who is based outside of Thailand to visit our website and enter the credit card number and other purchase info for you. PayPal will not require a PayPal account since the purchase is coming from a computer outside of Thailand.

• If you work for a company/organization based outside of Thailand and you have the ability to log into their network (e.g. via VPN or other corporate firewall), then make the purchase through their network. PayPal will see this as a purchase coming from outside Thailand, and offer you the choice to enter your credit card number directly.

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Existing Windows customers can download the latest Windows release free here.

Each platform (Palm OS, Windows, Apple iOS, Android) is sold separately, so upgrades do not apply across platforms.

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The simple reason for this is that all the platforms for which we've developed dictionaries so far (Palm OS, Windows, Apple iOS) are completely and utterly incompatible at the developer level, and so each app has required a complete rewrite of all our app UI code from scratch with no re-use of old code. This means the development process for each is extremely costly and time-consuming for us at Word in the Hand. So it is necessary for us to charge across platforms in order for us to have any hope of recovering our development costs. Otherwise, we would simply not be able to stay in business and offer you any dictionary at all!

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Our complete product line of dictionaries for Windows, iOS (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch), and Android is a dream come true for large institutions who employ large numbers of expat workers. With a single easy centralized purchase, you could have the world's leading Thai-English dictionary for English speakers on every employee's device, smoothing their transition to the Land of Smiles and saving you both work and training costs. Plus, Paiboon Publishing offers a huge range of other Thai language learning materials for those employees who want to go deeper. If your business, school, or institution is interested in purchase of a large number of units (say, 3000-5000 units over the multi-year course of our business relationship), please contact us and we can discuss creating a customised version of our software that is easy to deploy across your entire institution.

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You can download the free, limited trial version of our app on this page.

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After that initial activation is complete, all the dictionary entries and sounds are stored on your computer, so you can look up Thai words even when you are not connected to the internet.

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• you switch PCs,
• you reinstall your operating system (for example, after a disk crash or OS upgrade), or
• you perform a major hardware upgrade to your computer.

If reactivation is necessary, you will see a window pop up when you run your dictionary, asking you for your Purchase Code. As long as you are using the dictionary on only one PC at a time, you will be able to complete the activation smoothly and at no additional cost to you.

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When you switch PCs (for example, when you buy a new one), you need to uninstall the dictionary from our old PC, and then install the dictionary on your new PC.

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Purchase and
Download Instantly
$32.95

Order CD-ROM
by Mail
$39.95

Please be aware that the CD-ROM version will also require activation: After you install the software, the computer running the software must be on the internet for a few seconds so that it can activate the software.

After that initial activation is complete, all the dictionary entries and sounds are stored on your computer, so you can look up Thai words even when you are not connected to the internet.

Also, due to inherent delays in manufacturing and distribution, the CD-ROM version you receive might not be the latest version available on the internet. So in some cases you may end up downloading the latest version over the internet (though you can use the Purchase Code found on the sticker inside your CD-ROM box to do so).

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If you want to use the software on more than one computer, you will need to purchase two licenses so that you have two different Purchase Codes that you enter at installation time.

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But you don't have to. If your computer crashes or otherwise needs to be reinstalled, you can always return to our website and download the installer again on this page, free of charge.

Important: In order to reactivate the software on your new (or newly reinstalled) computer, you must still have your original Purchase Code that we emailed to you at the time of purchase. If you haven't already, write down and save your Purchase Code today (outside your computer!). Your Purchase Code is what entitles you to activate the software. It also entitles you to free upgrades to later Windows versions. Without your Purchase Code, you will need to purchase a new copy in order to get the software working again.

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You might see this when downloading our small free, limited trial version (which is around 7 MB in size), or our full version (which is around 350 megabytes (350 MB, or 0.35GB) in size).

When downloading the full version of our software from a computer located in Thailand, be sure to use our Singapore server rather than our US server for faster and more reliable download. However, often the problem is with your local Internet provider so you will see problems no matter which server you choose.

Unfortunately, such problems often happen when downloading any large file on the internet, including our installers, over slow or unreliable connections.

Your connection may work just fine for doing email and viewing normal web pages (which consist primarily of small files), yet you may experience this problem when downloading larger files.

These problems are caused by severe, willful incompetence in the way that many of the world's internet service providers (ISPs) deal with internet traffic that goes beyond their planning or expectation. These incompetent providers have decided to intentionally terminate any connection that's been open for "too long" (which they decide themselves, without your permission). They usually use euphemisms like "traffic shaping" to describe how they abruptly and randomly cut off your connections, preventing you from downloading a complete file. In some countries, this "traffic shaping" is actually illegal, but the providers do it anyway as a last-ditch workaround for their own lack of proper provisioning. In the long term, internet providers who do "traffic shaping" need to be penalized in the market and eventually pushed out of business. Please help this effort if you can.

In the short term, however, you want your dictionary! So here are our tips on how to get a complete and correct download with unreliable connections:

• The simplest method, if possible, is to download the file from a more reliable connection. Find a friend or internet cafe that has a reliable, land-based connection such as a DSL/ADSL or Cable Modem connection. It's even okay to use Wi-Fi wireless internet, as long as the station transmitting the Wi-Fi signal is connected to the internet by a reliable connection.

• The next easiest thing to try is to download our installer using the Firefox web browser, instead of the inferior Internet Explorer web browser that comes with Windows. If your download stops in the middle due to connection problems, or if you need to turn off your computer for a while, you will generally be able to re-start the download where you left off by using the Pause, Cancel and Retry buttons in Firefox's Downloads window (Tools...Downloads):

  

  The retry feature doesn't always work properly in Firefox, but it works more often than other web browsers.

  If using Firefox alone doesn't help, here is a simple but cool idea from one of our users. If you use the Firefox buttons shown above to intentionally pause and restart the download a couple of times at evenly-spaced intervals during the download (say, pause for 5 seconds every 20 minutes or so), this may bring you victory over the incompetent ISPs and deliver a complete file. This trick works because you are effectively splitting your long file request into three or four shorter requests, and the ISP traffic shaping misfeature is more likely to cause problems with long requests.

• Finally, if not even Firefox works for you, and you must use an unreliable internet connection, then your only resort is to use a "download manager," also known as a "download accelerator." These are third-party software packages that you install on your computer that can reliably re-start any failed download where you left off, and generally increase your download speed as well.

  Warning: the legitimate download managers are safe and work well, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of so-called "download managers" on the internet which contain malware that will secretly install viruses and spyware on your computer, violating your privacy and potentially putting your data at risk. Some download managers are free and some cost money. Obviously, the free ones are more likely to contain malware, but this is not always so. When choosing a download manager, you must seek out a recent recommendation from a source that you trust. Not only are there lots of malware-infested download managers, but there are also fake download manager review websites pushing malware-infested download managers to unsuspecting users. Only trust a review from a source that you recognize, and be sure to check the user comments on more than one site, remembering that the Bad Guys will also place (usually very obviously) fake user comments on review sites.

  Here at Word in the Hand we have had good experiences with one package called Internet Download Manager (this product is free for 30 days and then costs USD $25-$30 as of March 2010). We have no affiliate relationship with or financial gain from this company whatsoever.

  We have also had a very good experience making extensive use of the free, open-source Firefox browser extension called DownThemAll and have not yet heard any accounts of it containing malware of any kind, as of January 2012. Again we have no affiliate relationship with or financial gain from DownThemAll whatsoever (it's free!).

  We believe there are other, completely free download managers that are effective and also malware-free, but we have not yet evaluated any of them ourselves.

• If you are more technical and are comfortable with command lines, you can also use the free command-line tool called wget, because wget is able to reliably re-start a failed download where it left off. The command-line to use is:

  wget --continue [URL]
  

  Where you replace [URL] with the URL of the file to be downloaded, and you run the command as many times as are needed to get the complete file.

We at Word in the Hand apologize for the hassle involved in downloading over the internet but sadly this is our current state-of-the-art as the internet evolves faster than internet service providers can handle it.

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We receive such a notification about once a year, and in each case it turns out to be a "false positive:" a case where the virus checker thinks it founds a virus but none is there. In these cases, the anti-virus vendors typically update their virus databases in a few days to correct the false positive.

For example, in 2010 there was one report with Avira, in 2011 there was one with AVG, and in 2012 there was one with ESET.

If you are at all suspicious that the copy of our dictionary installer that you downloaded is corrupt, we recommend that you check the integrity of the file on your computer by computing its checksum. Here are the correct checksums for our version 1.6 installer, using several different checksum systems:

% sum ThaiDict_1_6_full.exe   (regular UNIX checksum)
28962 359383

% md5sum ThaiDict_1_6_full.exe   (MD5 checksum)
1155c2280e40ac76bd4b5c13cd9f17fe  ThaiDict_1_6_full.exe

% sha1sum ThaiDict_1_6_full.exe   (SHA1 checksum)
7ed0a6b06a2bda8fc74cb0041ffcafab6110fe6f  ThaiDict_1_6_full.exe

The exact size of the file ThaiDict_1_6_full.exe in bytes should be: 368,007,849, but be aware that viruses often infect your .exe files while keeping their file size the same, so using the checksums above is a much stronger method of checking the file.

For the sake of completeness, we should mention another more sinister possible source of your virus report, though keep in mind this is extremely unlikely. You may have malware on your computer that your virus checker is not able to detect, but which is infecting other files on your computer (including our dictionary or its installer) whose infection your virus checker can detect. Viruses like to infect installer programs because when you install any piece of software (including ThaiDict), the installer also copies an uninstaller program that you will later run if you uninstall the software. That is a perfect opportunity for a virus to hide out and reappear at an unexpected later time (when you uninstall some software). So if ThaiDict is the only software you recently installed, that would explain why the virus report seems to single out ThaiDict. Again this scenario is unlikely (your problem is almost always a false positive) but if you suspect your computer is infected you could try installing an alternate anti-virus program to get a second opinion (typically you can only have one anti-virus program installed at once).

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See our visual tour for more info.

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You can use the on-screen keyboard in two ways:

• You can click directly on the "keys" of the keyboard with your mouse.

• You can use your keyboard, and as you press keys, the corresponding "keys" of the on-screen keyboard will flash. Using this tool you can rapidly teach your hands to touch-type the right keys.

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With a single click of the mouse, all pronunciation guides transform into your chosen system, and you can even look up Thai words by sound using your chosen system.

For all the details on each system, including where it comes from and exactly what symbols it uses, download our free, limited trial version and check out the Help section called "Pronunciation Guides."

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Paiboon Publishing is the world's leading producer of South-East Asian language learning materials, including the famous Thai for Beginners and the infamous Thai for Lovers. There's even an audio companion to the learning books, a guide to pronunciation, and a multi-volume series on how to Speak Like a Thai.

Our software dictionary is the perfect companion to these materials because it supports the same pronunciation guide system as the Paiboon Thai products (for more detail on pronunciation guide systems, see Search-by-Sound™).

If you have a mobile device, don't miss out on this indispensable learning app from Paiboon Publishing:

The Thai for Beginners App
by Benjawan Poomsan Becker
and Dominique Mayrand

For iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch: Buy Now
For Android: available mid-2012.

The best Thai language learning app available anywhere!

Paiboon Publishing’s Thai for Beginners app makes it easy to study your Thai lessons wherever you go with your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. The lessons follow the format of the Thai for Beginners book but a real Thai person speaks each of the over 3,000 words or phrases. Test your ability to hear and understand Thai or test your knowledge of written Thai with the built in exercises. Hearing the spoken Thai will help you increase the speed of learning the language that no book alone can do. Plus you’ll find many new opportunities to practice your Thai since your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch will be with you all the time.

Buy Now from the Apple iTunes App Store

For more info on Paiboon Publishing products, see www.paiboonpublishing.com. Here are just some of the titles that you can use alongside the dictionary software:

Thai for Beginners	Thai for Intermediate Learners	Thai for Advanced Readers	New Thai-English Dictionary
Thai for Travelers	Practical Thai Conversation - Vol 1	Practical Thai Conversation - Vol 2	Improving Your Thai Pronunciation
Speak Like a Thai Volume 1	Speak Like a Thai Volume 2	Speak Like a Thai Volume 3	Speak Like a Thai Volume 4
Speak Like a Thai Volume 5	Speak Like a Thai Volume 6	Speak Like a Thai Volume 7	Thai Keyboard Stickers
Thailand Fever	Thailand Fieber	Thai for Lovers	Thai for Gay Tourists
Retiring in Thailand	How to Buy Land and Build a House in Thailand	How to Establish a Successful Business in Thailand	Thai Law for Foreigners

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