Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems No English in Dashboard Dictionary

When I "upgraded" to OSX 10.10 from 10.6 on my old Macbook Pro a few months ago, I discovered that the Dashboard Dictionary no longer had an English option. There was just Japanese, Greek and Russian. FYI, I have these 3 languages enabled in my keyboard input preferences, but English is the primary one. So, I assume that's how they ended up as dictionary options. But no English! After a bunch of tinkering but not remembering what I did, the English finally returned.

Now I just got a new Macbook Pro (with OSX 10.10.5), and have exactly the same problem again. I had installed all the files from a Time machine backup of my old computer onto my new one.

After much tinkering I'm still unable to get the English back. I tried deleting Japanese, Greek and Russian from the keyboard input options, leaving only English (Canadian English, to be precise). I think that's how I fixed it last time. But no luck this time.

I'm guessing there's a prefs or plist file somewhere that needs to be deleted, but I don't know where to look. Any ideas?

Finally figured it out.

I did find where all the dashboard widget plists are located, and I deleted all of the dictionary related ones, as well as any general dashboard plists that I could find, but that still didn't fix the problem.

Then I discovered that the Dictionary App had the same settings as the Dictionary Dashboard Widget. So, I opened the Dictionary App, went into the preferences, and enabled the English dictionaries. Now everything works again. Took me a long time to figure out, because I never use the Dictionary App, and had forgotten that it even existed.

The Dashboard Dictionary is nothing more than an alternate interface or portal to the Dictionary App and the Dictionary App is a standard Apple utility that cannot be deleted and provides a variety of functions for other Apple apps as well as any number of third party apps.

Yes, I realized that as soon as I started playing with the main Dictionary app and saw the same settings. I learn something new every day.