DICT

DICT is a dictionary network protocol created by the DICT Development Group.[1] It is described by RFC 2229, published in 1997. Its goal is to surpass the Webster protocol and to allow clients to access more dictionaries during use. Dict servers and clients use TCP port 2628.

Resources for free dictionaries from DICT protocol servers

Dictionaries of English

Bilingual dictionaries

DICT servers

DICT file format

The standard dictd server made by the DICT Development Group uses a special DICT file format, although other dictd servers (such as GNU Dico) may optionally use other file formats.

Dictionaries in the standard DICT file format are made up of two files, a .index file and a .dict file (or .dict.dz if compressed). These files are not usually written manually but are compiled 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 format i.e.:

:word1:definition 1
:word2:definition 2
etc.

Once the dictionary file has been produced, installing it in the server is normally a matter of typing something like:

mv mydict.dict mydict.index /usr/share/dictd/
/usr/sbin/dictdconfig -—write
/etc/init.d/dictd restart

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:

There are also programs that read the DICT file format directly. For example, S60Dict,[17] 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 converters

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

References

  1. "dict.org". Dict.org. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  2. "dict.org: Resources". Dict.org. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  3. "delorie.com". Delorie.com. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  4. "sourceforge.net". Sourceforge.net. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  5. "ndl.kie.ua". Ndl.kiev.ua. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  6. "gnu.org". Gnu.org. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  7. Ho Ngoc Duc. "informatik.uni-leipzig.de". Informatik.uni-leipzig.de. Retrieved 16 October 2014.
  8. "DICT Client". SourceForge. Archived from the original on 5 May 2013.
  9. "DictEm - Dictionary client for Emacs download". SourceForge. Archived from the original on 1 October 2015.
  10. "garage: MaemoDict: Project Info". Garage.maemo.org. Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  11. "mozdev.org - dict: index". Dict.mozdev.org. Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  12. "OKDict". Kilargo. Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  13. "Presentation". Pentila. Archived from the original on 22 October 2008.
  14. "Start —". Zope.org. Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  15. "Pentila Néro". Pentila.com. Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  16. Giannakakis, Kostas. "S60Dict". Archived from the original on 11 June 2013.
  17. "Linguae, gestionnaire de dictionnaires". Linguae.stalikez.info. Retrieved 2015-03-07.
  18. "soshial/xdxf_makedict · GitHub". Github.com. Retrieved 2015-03-07.
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