David Cox's How to Use e-Sword Dictionary Panel

 Overview  

e-Sword has a very nice implementation of Bible use and study. For sake of explaining things, I will divide the e-Sword user interface into sections which I call "panels". This page will deal only with the Dictionary panel and the how it relates to the other panels. If you are not already familiar with e-Sword, open the program and the study the image below to familiarize yourself with the general panels and layout.

E-Sword has dictionaries that are automatically linked to a word in the Bible or Commentary panels when you double click on a word. You must download and install these dictionaries, and then restart e-Sword before they will appear in the tabs in the Dictionary Panel.

As a special note, the dictionary module is ordered according to the creator's interest, and it is not necessarily alphabetical. You should remember that in searching and using dictionaries.

Also note that there are some special dictionaries which are keyed to Strong's Exhaustive Concordance. Strongs is Greek and Hebrew Lexicon that made an entry for each word in the Bible according to whether it was Greek or Hebrew, and in modern use, this is represented by an "H" for Hebrew, and a "G" for Greek plus the number of the word (alphabetically the first hebrew word is H1, and the first Greek word is G1).

See the KJV+ that comes with e-Sword and click on one of the Greek or Hebrew numbers after a word in that Bible. See the image at right. I hovered the cursor over this G1321 and got the Greek word and definition, and clicking on it would make the Dictionary seek that "G1321" which is the keyword in the Strong's Dictionary.

 Getting around an e-Sword Dictionary Module

e-Sword dictionaries are structured around a keyword. Each keyword has a definition that appears in the main dictionary window.

Before we start, we need to explain how to navigate the Dictionary modules.

Here I clicked the maximize the Dictionary window and I have my own dictionary, Plants and Animals of the Bible selected on the tab (P&A). Notice that the selected word "ant" has entries in many of these dictionaries, and each one has a "i" bubble in the tab before the dictionary name.

I had the cursor over the Proverbs 30:25 reference so it shows that verse in the tooltip popup in current Bible version selected in the Bible Panel (in my case the KJV red letter edition).

Also note that there is a window to the right with all the dictionary keywords, and ant is selected. This window can be toggled by clicking on the Dictionary Topics icon in the icon bar, or by pressing Control T.

You can always tell what particular verse is current in the Bible panel by looking at the last line of the interface, and it will have the current active Bible verse, Dictionary word, and Commentary note.

Navigating the Dictionary Panel

So to find a word in the dictionary, just double click on it in the text of the Bible Window, or in the Commentaries window. This also works in Topics Notes and Study notes in the Commentary panel, but it does not work in the same Dictionary Panel.

 Changing Dictionaries

To change dictionaries, simply click on the tab of the dictionary you want to see in the dictionary panel. Note that only Dictionaries that you have in your e-Sword folder will appear in these tabs, and only those that are read at startup of the e-Sword program that time. Sometimes people create Dictionaries that are not correct, have programming errors, etc, and these will not be included.

Also note that you can manually exclude or include the dictionaries that appear in these tabs. Go to main menu "Options" and then click on "Resources". In the three check box windows, the middle one will have all the dictionaries that e-Sword has found, and you can manually check or remove the check from these boxes beside the dictionaries name, and you will see only the checked ones in your e-Sword when you click "OK" and return to e-Sword. At times you download a dictionaries just to see if you like it, and that is "bothersome" at times if you have a lot of dictionaries . This is the place to make the dictionaries tabs more readable.

 Too Many Dictionaries

If you have too many dictionaries and it takes up too much real estate, you can also go to "Options" on the Main Menu, and then "Layout" on the submenu. Here on the far right, there is an option for "Tabs" and you can change it from the default "Multiple Rows" to "Single Row", and all the dictionaries will appear in one single row with arrows to see more to the left or right. This will make it hard to see if the dictionaries has the "i" information bubble on a dictionaries tab, so I would not recommend it except if you really need this option.

 Using the Dictionaries Icons

These are the icon menus for the Dictionary Panel.

The Dictionary Topic History List.

This arrow icon will go back to through the Dictionary keywords that you have looked up.

 The Dictionary Print Preview Icon.

The first one is the Print Preview for printing a Dictionary note entry. This dialog box is seen in the image at right. 

From this window you can view the note as it will be printed.

The menu bar is as follows from the left: Close this window, print, change margins, Go to first page, go to preview page, drop down of all pages, go to next page, go to last page, resize in window to see 100%, fit width, whole page.

 Searching the Dictionary Icon.

This icon will open a dialog box whereby you can search the dictionary (only the currently active dictionary) for a word, phrase, or group of words.

In the image at left, I opened the search dialog box with the Torrey Dictionary Tab active.

In this example I searched for the word "Messiah" which was found in the text entries for the dictionary words "Election, Miracles, Moabites, Samaria, Titles and Names of Christ, and Witness of the Holy Spirit".

I selected the entry "Election" and in the text, the word Messiah is highlighted automatically.

The tooltips are active even in the search window so I moved the cursor over the reference, Isaiah 42:1, and I saw what the verse was.

Again, the options here are to search (which changes the results in the boxes below), or to Accept which will allow me to load the selected entry (in this case "Election") into the Dictionary window.

 Editing icons

These three are used for editing text within the commentary. The first icon is for selecting all the text in the current commentary note, the second one is for copying to the clipboard the selected text (if nothing is selected it is grayed out as in the image), and the third one copies to the active Study note (if it is not locked).

The Magnifying Glass icon is used for making the text of the commentary larger, which is very useful at times when dealing with Greek and Hebrew where the vowel pointing or subscripts are hard to read.

 Topic Window icon

This is a toggle switch for opening a list of all the keywords in the Dictionary module. In the image at right, see the right hand list in the little window at right.

This icon will toggle this window open (visible) and close (invisible).

You can type in a word in the top box (in the image, the word "election" is selected) and the dictionary will seek on that word. Note that in the bottom line of the program, in the status bar, the word "Dictionary:" with the last word searched for is in this line.

Synchronization  

This icon is for keeping a sync between the words you click on and the dictionary window. In other words, if this icon is not clicked, then double clicking on a word will not send the dictionary to seek a match. If it is clicked on, then it will.