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dictionaries

A local dictionary server with an English dictionary, a thesaurus, computing terms and acronyms

What it does

Runs dictd, a dictionary server, with four databases: GCIDE (a large English dictionary descended from Webster's 1913), WordNet (definitions and synonyms), FOLDOC (computing terms) and VERA (acronyms). dict WORD looks a word up in all of them from a terminal; goldendict-ng does the same on the desktop.

Why you would want it

A word, a synonym or an acronym, answered with no network, in 32 MB rather than the 9 GB of an offline Wiktionary. Acronyms especially: a message passed on a net is full of them.

Before it will work

Nothing. dictd starts as a system service when installed and listens on 127.0.0.1 port 2628 only.

How it installs

  • apt: dictd, dict, dict-gcide, dict-wn, dict-foldoc, dict-vera

Known problems

dictd listens on loopback because Debian's shipped configuration says so; if you edit /etc/dictd/dictd.conf to share it, you are opening a server to the network. dict -D lists the databases. Translation dictionaries are separate dict-freedict-* packages (253 of them in Debian, 32 from English) and are not installed here: choose the ones for the languages you serve.

Keeping it current

  • probe: apt policy
  • strategy: apt_upgrade

Where to get help with the software itself

The DICT development group (https://dict.org/); the Debian packages' bug trackers for packaging problems.

Source: catalog/packages/dictionaries.yaml