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DICT is a
dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...
network protocol created by the DICT Development Group in 1997, described by RFC 2229. Its goal is to surpass the
Webster protocol Webster may refer to: People * Webster (surname), including a list of people with the surname *Webster (given name), including a list of people with the given name Places Canada *Webster, Alberta *Webster's Falls, Hamilton, Ontario United Stat ...
to allow clients to access a variety of
dictionaries A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, p ...
via a uniform interface. In section 3.2 of the DICT protocol RFC, queries and definitions are sent in clear-text, meaning that there is no encryption. Nevertheless, according to section 3.1 of the RFC, various forms of authentication (sans encryption) are supported, including Kerberos version 4. The protocol consists of a few commands a server must recognize so a client can access the available data and lookup word definitions. DICT servers and clients use TCP port 2628 by default. Queries are captured in the following URL scheme:
dict://;@:/::::


Resources for free dictionaries from DICT protocol servers

A repository of source files for the DICT Development group's dict protocol server (with a few sample dictionaries) is available online.


Dictionaries of English

* Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856) *
CIA World Factbook ''The World Factbook'', also known as the ''CIA World Factbook'', is a reference resource produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with almanac-style information about the countries of the world. The official print version is available ...
* Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) *
Elements database Element or elements may refer to: Science * Chemical element, a pure substance of one type of atom * Heating element, a device that generates heat by electrical resistance * Orbital elements, parameters required to identify a specific orbit of ...
* Free On-line Dictionary of Computing * Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary *
Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET A ...
* Moby Thesaurus * Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary *
The Devil's Dictionary ''The Devil's Dictionary'' is a satire, satirical dictionary written by American journalist Ambrose Bierce, consisting of common words followed by humorous and satirical definitions. The lexicon was written over three decades as a series of insta ...
(1911) * The U.S. Gazetteer (1990 Census) * V.E.R.A. – Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms which are used in the field of computing *
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary ''Webster's Dictionary'' is any of the English language dictionaries edited in the early 19th century by American lexicographer Noah Webster (1758–1843), as well as numerous related or unrelated dictionaries that have adopted the Webster's n ...
(1913) * WordNet


Bilingual dictionaries

* Big English–Russian Dictionary * English–French dictionary * Freedict provides a collection of over 85 translating dictionaries, as XML source files with the data, mostly accompanied by databases generated from the XML files in the format used by DICT servers and clients. These are available from the Freedict project web site at. * FREELANG Dictionary * Lingvo English–Russian and Russian–English dictionaries are not free, but when purchased, can easily be converted into DICT format * Mueller's English–Russian dictionary * Slovak-English legal dictionary * Slovak-Italian legal dictionary


DICT servers

* dictd (the standard server made by the DICT Development Group) * DictD++ – modern powerful server written in C++ with heavy usage of STL and boost * GNU Dico * JDictd – a Java-based DICT server implementation (abandoned)


DICT clients

A dictd server can be used from Telnet. For example, to connect to the DICT server on localhost, on a Unix system one can normally type: telnet localhost dict and then enter the command "help" to see the available commands. The standard dictd package also provides a "dict" command for command-line use. More sophisticated DICT clients include: *
cURL cURL (pronounced like "curl", UK: , US: ) is a computer software project providing a library (libcurl) and command-line tool (curl) for transferring data using various network protocols. The name stands for "Client URL". History cURL was fi ...
* dictc (DICT Client) client for Windows written in
Delphi Delphi (; ), in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), in ancient times was a sacred precinct that served as the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient classical world. The oracle ...
. * dict.org's own client (part of the dictd package) * dictem, for the
Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...
text editor *
Dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...
, an application included with Mac OS X. Online dictionaries can be accessed by setting it as the helper for 'dict://' URI schemes. * Fantasdic * GNOME Dictionary, comes with
GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...
* GNU dico's own client (part of the dico package) * Kdict, comes with
KDE KDE is an international Free software movement, free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-know ...
* KTranslator, KDE dictionary * MaemoDict, for the
Nokia 770 The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is a wireless Internet appliance from Nokia, originally announced at the LinuxWorld Summit in New York City on 25 May 2005. It is designed for wireless Internet browsing and email functions and includes software suc ...
* MATE Dictionary (with accompanying applet) *
Mozdev.org mozdev.org was a website that offered free project hosting, and software development tools to the Mozilla community. Site hosted extensions for Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey and stand-alone Mozilla-based applications. It was free to set up a ...
's 'dict', a Firefox/ Mozilla extension * OKDict, an OpenOffice.org extension * OmniDictionary, for Mac OS X * StarDict * ZopeDictDB for Zope from Pentila * GoldenDict * xfce4-dict, from the Xfce project There are also programs that read the DICT file format directly. For example, S60Dict, is a dictionary program for Symbian Series 60 that uses DICT dictionaries. Additionally, some DICT clients, such as Fantasdic, are also capable of reading the DICT format directly.


Dict file format

The standard dictd server made by the DICT Development Group uses a special ''dict'' file format. It comprises two files, a ''.index'' file and a ''.dict'' file (or ''.dict.dz'' if compressed). These files are usually generated by a program called ''dictfmt''. For example, the Unix command: dictfmt --utf8 --allchars -s "My Dictionary" -j mydict < mydict.txt will compile a Unicode-compatible DICT file called ''mydict'', with heading ''My Dictionary'', from ''mydict.txt'' which is in
Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET A ...
format i.e.: :word1:definition 1 :word2:definition 2 etc. Once the dictionary file has been produced, it can be easily installed on a server with commands similar to this: mv mydict.dict mydict.index /usr/share/dictd/ /usr/sbin/dictdconfig—write /etc/init.d/dictd restart


Format converters

* Linguae Software is able to convert from/to wb, dict (stardict and dictd) csv, xdxf, txt, ini and ling (native) file formats, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. * XDXF XML Dictionary Exchange Format converts between various dictionary formats using pluggable codec architecture.


dictzip

In order to efficiently store dictionary data, ''dictzip'', an extension to the gzip compression format (also the name of the utility), can be used to compress a .dict file. Dictzip compresses file in chunks and stores the chunk index in the gzip file header, thus allowing random access to the data.


See also

* DICT clients


References


External links


RFC 2229
– Definition of the DICT protocol
dict.org
DICT Development Group. A WWW interface to several freely available on-line dictionaries.
DICT protocol server list
by the FreeDict project {{DEFAULTSORT:Dict Internet protocols