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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Our Android application uses Google's Android Market Licensing in order to verify your purchase. Android Market Licensing periodically requires access to the internet. The license check is done on very rare intervals (it's done when you first download, install, and activate our software, and then it's done at most every 15 days with multiple days of grace period in case you don't happen to be on the internet on the day that Google first checks). So, in the vast majority of cases, customers never notice the license checks. In extreme cases, if your device is off the internet permanently for an extended period of time, you may see a message saying "Unable to verify your purchase of this app." In that case, you need only connect your device to the internet once (for example, bring it to an internet cafe with WiFi), run the app once, and the license will be valid again for at least 15 days. If you are having problems with the license check, see below.

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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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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

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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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 275 megabytes (275 MB, or 0.275GB) in size).

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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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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