Abstract: Through an electronic dictionary, a system and method for playing vocabulary explanations using multimedia data provides texts, pictures, sounds, animations, music, and videos for explaining words. The electronic dictionary has an input unit, a database, a display unit, a central processing unit (CPU), and a multimedia player. The database further stores keyword index data and keyword explanation data. The keyword explanation data include texts, pictures, sounds, animations, music and videos. By looking up the dictionary, the user can obtain thorough information via the multimedia word explanations and be able to learn more efficiently about the language.