DICT - Definition and Overview

DICT is a dictionary network protocol created by the DICT Development Group. It is described by RFC 2229. Its goal is to surpass the Webster protocol and to allow clients to access more dictionaries at the same time.

Several free dictionaries are available in the dict format:

• Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
• V.E.R.A.
• Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary
• WordNet
• Jargon File
• The Devil's Dictionary ((c) 1911)
• Elements database
• U.S. Gazetteer (1990)
• Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
• CIA World Factbook
• Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary
• the freedict bilingual dictionaries

Combined, they make up the Free Internet Lexicon and Encyclopedia

Some DICT protocol clients:

• Kdict, comes with KDE
• gnome-dictionary, comes with GNOME
• dict.org's dict
• OmniDictionary (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidictionary/), for Mac OS X

StarDict is a desktop dictionary. It doesn't support the DICT protocol directly. Instead, it provides a converter. Which would imply that you need to store data twice if you want to use it both with the DICT protocal and with StarDict.

External link

• www.dict.org
• DICT protocol server list (http://luetzschena-stahmeln.de/dictd/index.php)
• RFC-2229 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2229.html), the actual definition of the DICT protocol
• wik2dict (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/wik2dict), a tool to download Wikipedia and Wiktionary database dumps and convert them into the dict format