Saturday, June 6, 2026

Language selection and typehead suggestion improvements

WikDict got two visible changes today: a new way to pick a language pair, and better suggestions while you search for a word.

Picking a language pair

The old home page listed the available pairs as dropdown menus grouped by language. That layout had been around since 2015, when WikDict grew to enough dictionaries that a single flat list got unwieldy. It worked well enough when there were only eleven languages to select, but now with 26 languages, finding the right one took longer than it should.

The new picker shows a tile per language, each with its flag, its name and the number of translations it holds. Your two current languages are highlighted. Tap a third one and it takes the place of whichever language you used least recently, so going from German↔English to French↔English is a single tap instead of a trip through a dropdown. When you come to the homepage the next time, the list will start with your recently used languages will be at the top so you won't have to look through the whole list. 

Search suggestions

As you type, WikDict suggests matching words. The old version put the suggestions for both directions in one list and tagged each with a small (de) or (en). Type something like "ban" and the German and English words ended up mixed together, which made the list fiddly to read.

Now each language gets its own group under a small flag banner. Shorter and exact matches rank higher, so the word you probably meant is usually near the top. 

While I was at it, I rewrote the search box in plain JavaScript and threw out jQuery and an old autocomplete library (Twitter Bootstrap typeahead, which is deprecated for 13 years already), so the page loads a little lighter. An old bug where words with non-Latin characters would not match while you typed is gone too.

If anything in the new version does not work well for you, please let me know!