There are two types of user dictionary in ABBYY Lingvo:
- Editable dictionaries. These dictionaries can be created and edited on the fly directly from the Lingvo shell. Cards in such dictionaries have a simple structure and may contain only headwords and their translations.
- DSL dictionaries. These dictionaries are created outside the Lingvo shell by means of a DSL Compiler. The DSL Compiler is particularly convenient when creating large dictionaries containing thousands of words.
Cards in DSL dictionaries have the same structure as the cards in other Lingvo dictionaries: they allow for complex formatting (bold-face fonts, italics, underlined text, colour fonts, indents) and may contain multimedia (sound and images) and hyperlinks to other cards. You can also mark certain zones in the cards as translation zones, comments zones and examples zone.