What is Flazzle?

Flazzle is a program for Windows 2000/XP or above that makes it simple to input, learn, or look up words and characters in a language, including English.

Available Dictionaries

These can be downloaded within Flazzle's interface.

Support Languages
Excellent English-English, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, Vietnamese
Very Good  Arabic, Belarusian, French, Croatian, Czech, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Thai
Good Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Cornish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Gothic, Greek, Hebrew (Romanized), Icelandic, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Kurdish, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish

This table only contains the dictionaries with more than a few thousand entries. Flazzle can allow input and looking up characters in most written languages even where there are no dictionaries available.

  Truly Multilingual

Flazzle can currently allow you to type just over 200 languages using your existing keyboard (assuming you have a keyboard that can type the 52 characters from a-Z):

  • Accent selectors allow input of accents. For example, typing 'a' will pop up a window with accents, and you can press a number to finish.



  • Transliteration converts from one alphabet to another, e.g. Latin - Hangul (Korean):



  • Specific inputs for Japanese and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional):



  • And onscreen keyboards mimic a physical keyboard, e.g. Hindi:



  • More inputs here.

See script support for info on which scripts, e.g. Arabic, are supported.

Flazzle Pro has Unicode 5.0 character information, which allows text and symbols from a majority of the writing systems in use today to be displayed.

It comes with fonts for most languages, and installs CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) fonts as needed. Flazzle automatically chooses inputs and fonts based on selected languages.

  Networked

Flazzle Pro can download hundreds of dictionaries from the non-commercial Flazzle archive quickly and easily. You can also create your own archive to share dictionaries and content to others.

Technical: You can download files from (and possibly upload to) various protocols including FTP, HTTP, FILE and local.


  Character Information

Optional 'Popups' show you the name, type and meaning, if relevant, for virtually any character. Cantonese/Mandarin popups show the relevant Pinyin or Jyutping information, Japanese Kanji popups show the On/Kun reading and character information from the Unicode character database for all others.


  Find Your Character

A character palette allows easy searching of characters whether looking up Chinese Hanzi/Japanese Kanji by radical, or any other character from a Unicode 5.0 (e.g. Cyrillic) or Conscript (e.g. Tolkien/Klingon) script.


  Powerful Dictionary

A dictionary client with wildcard matching: * searches for multiple characters, e.g. “cat*” will find all words starting with “cat”, and ? for a single character, so “catc?” can find “catch”. Bookmarks keep track of words so you don't need to, and assigned to a unique per-user login. Words are searched automatically, as they are typed. And if a word isn't found, Flazzle gives spelling hints.


  Input Outside Flazzle

Flazzle WorldEdit allows typing in all languages supported by Flazzle, which you can then copy into other programs, like Microsoft Word ®.


  File Formats

Flazzle Pro supports import of more than 30 file formats of flashcards and dictionaries which can be downloaded (mostly for free) from the internet. See here for a full listing.

  Speech and Sound

Text-To-Speech support is available for Microsoft SAPI4 (Agent) and SAPI5. Can also record high-quality 44khz compressed ogg vorbis audio from a microphone.