What it does
A dictionary that ships with it
111,466 English words are built in, so the app is useful the moment it opens — nothing to download, nothing to configure. Built from Open English WordNet and SentiWordNet.
It knows what a word implies
Slim, skinny and emaciated all mean thin, and choosing between them is not a matter of meaning. Hand-reviewed entries carry a note on where a word sits among its neighbours, and whether it praises, describes or disparages.
Every dictionary at once
One search queries all your enabled dictionaries. Each answer arrives on its own card, tagged with that dictionary's color, so you can see at a glance who said what.
Real StarDict support
Reads the standard free dictionary format: .ifo,
.idx (and .idx.gz), .dict and
dictzip-compressed .dict.dz, plus .syn
synonyms. Thousands of free dictionaries just work.
Fast, even when big
A 150,000-word dictionary loads in well under a second and answers a lookup in a fraction of a millisecond — including decompressing and rendering the article.
Works inside other apps
Select text anywhere and choose Define, or let your e-book reader call the app's popup directly through the standard lookup intent.
History & bookmarks
Recent searches are one tap away, and any word can be starred. Pronunciation uses your device's text-to-speech.
Private by construction
The app has no network permission at all. Your lookups never leave the device, because there is nowhere for them to go.
Installing
- Download the APK using the button above.
- Allow the install. Android will ask permission to install apps from this source — this is normal for apps distributed outside the Play Store.
- Open it. The full English dictionary is bundled inside the APK, so search works offline the moment it starts.
Two builds are published. The debug APK is signed and installs directly — take this one. The release APK is unsigned and is meant for developers who want to sign it themselves.
The built-in dictionary
Pop Up English Dictionary — 111,466 headwords, derived from Open English WordNet 2024 and SentiWordNet 3.0, and bundled inside the app.
What makes it unusual is the connotation layer. A conventional dictionary tells you that frugal and stingy both describe someone reluctant to spend. It does not tell you that one is a compliment. 781 senses, across 922 entries, have been reviewed by hand and carry a short note on the word's force, a position on its family's spectrum from disparaging to approving, and register labels where they apply.
Those reviewed senses are marked in the app; the rest are labelled as automatically derived, so you always know which is which. The review notes follow a published rule — describe the word, never guess at who uses it or where it came from — and every one of them has been read back and audited against the definition it sits under.
Adding more dictionaries
Beyond the built-in dictionary, the app reads any dictionary in StarDict format, and plenty are free to download — conversions of WordNet, FreeDict, Wiktionary and more. In the app open ⋮ → Dictionaries → Import dictionary files… and pick the files, or import a whole folder at once.
FreeDict downloads Free StarDict dictionaries Open English WordNet
For developers
The whole project is on GitHub under the MIT licence: a dependency-free Android app plus a pure-Java StarDict engine that also runs on the desktop.
git clone -b main https://github.com/Roviicc/ColorDict.git
cd ColorDict
./gradlew assembleDebug # build the APK
./run-desktop.sh # try the engine on a PC, JDK only