Dictd and Dictionaries on Linux

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On the command line, it is possible to use curl to get a dictionary
reference. We can first list all the dictionaries available at
dict.org like so:

curl dict://dict.org/show:db

This lists all available dictionaries and their shortnames:

gcide "The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48"  
wn "WordNet (r) 2.     
moby-thes "Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0"  
elements "Elements database 20001107"  
vera "Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms (Version 1.9, June 2002)"  
jargon "Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001)"  
foldoc "The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03)"  
easton "Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary"  
hitchcock "Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary (late 1800's)"  
bouvier "Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856)"  
devils "THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY ((C)1911 Released April 15 1993)"  
world02 "CIA World Factbook 2002"  
.  
.  
.  
eng-fra "English-French Freedict Dictionary"

To look up a word or phrase from a certain dictionary, issue:

curl dict://dict.org/d:word_goes_here:dictionary_short_name_here

For instance, I’ll attempt to look up India in the CIA World FactBook
(2002 edition):

curl dict://dict.org/d:India:world02 > India.Reference.txt

And obtain this (partial dump):

20 miranda.org dictd 1.9.15/rf on Linux 2.6.26-2-686 <auth.mime> <62887065.988.1256582810@miranda.org>  
250 ok  
150 1 definitions retrieved  
151 "India" world02 "CIA World Factbook 2002"  
India  
   
Introduction India  
------------------  
Background: The Indus Valley civilization, one   
of the oldest in the world, goes  
back at least 5,000 years. Aryan  
tribes from the northwest invaded  
about 1500 B.C.; their merger with  
the earlier inhabitants created the   
classical Indian culture. Arab  
incursions starting in the 8th  
century and Turkish in 12th were  
followed by European traders  
beginning in the late 15th century.  
By the 19th century, Britain had   
assumed political control of  
virtually all Indian lands.

Offline Dictionaries

The example above uses online resources. You might, however, need to use
these offline. Like everything else, there’s a tool for precisely this
purpose on Linux called dict and is
quite flexible in terms of its features. Think client-server
architecture, multiple dictionary references, configurable hosts on the
client side, etc.

The utility is split into two tools: dictd (the server daemon) and
dict (the client application.)

The dict client, by itself, can search the resources at dict.org if
you don’t want to install the server. What follows is a guide to
installing the dictd daemon and configuring the client app to look at
‘itself’ (i.e. localhost)

Step 1: Obtain and install dict

wget ftp://ftp.dict.org/dict/dictd-1.9.15.tar.gz

Where 1.9.15 is the latest version at the time of this writing. Untar it
and follow the typical installation
instructions to compile this from
source.

Note: You might get compiler warnings when running make against
lower version numbers since this is a
bug.

A few things:

Step 2: Obtain and set up dictionaries

The dictionary or reference files the dictd daemon requires have two
parts: the database and the index files. In this step, we will get the
Webster’s 1913 dictionary (which is in public domain).

wget ftp://ftp.dict.org/dict/pre/dict-web1913-1.4-pre.tar.gz

Once you untar the archive, place the two files web1913.dict.dz and
web1913.index in a convenient location. I placed mine at
/usr/share/dictionaries. Make sure these are readable!

chmod a+r web1913.dict.dz web1913.index

You can obtain other dictionaries by perusing the FTP site you got the
Webster’s dictionary from

Note: /usr/share/dict is not an appropriate location!
linux.words is the file used by the passwd command, for instance, to
determine weak passwords.

Step 3: Configure dict

You now need to create two configuration files for the dict server and
client: dictd.conf and dict.conf respectively. These need to go in
/usr/local/etc

Configure dictd server

dictd.conf will contain references to the database(s) from Step 2.

database web1913 { data "/usr/share/dictionary/web1913.dict.dz" 
                   index "/usr/share/dictionary/web1913.index" }

If you installed another reference database from the FTP
site in Step 2, append it to this file
using similar syntax. For instance, if I downloaded a list of chemical
elements, I would add this:

database elements { data "/usr/share/dictionary/elements.dict.dz"   
                   index "/usr/share/dictionary/elements.index" }

After this stage, start the dictd server

  /usr/local/sbin/dictd start

Test your installation with something

 dictd --test perspicacious

Configure dict client

dict.conf can contain a single server or a list of servers which have
the dictd daemon running. In this example, we’ll use our own machine

 server localhost

And that’s it! Test this with

 dict surreptitious

Other notes

You might need an init script if dict word does not work.

DICTD=/usr/local/bin/dictd

# DICTD_OPTIONS="-put -command_line -options -for -dictd -here"
DICTD_OPTIONS=""
DICTD_PID_FILE=/etc/dictd.pid

case "$1" in
    'start')
        if [ -x $DICTD ]; then
            echo "dictd starting."
            $DICTD $DICTD_OPTIONS
        else
            echo "dictd.init: cannot find $DICTD or it's not executable"
        fi  
    ;;  
    'stop')
        if [ ! -f $DICTD_PID_FILE ]; then
            exit 0
        fi  
        dictdpid=`cat $DICTD_PID_FILE`
        if [ "$dictdpid" -gt 0 ]; then
            echo "Stopping the dictd server."
            kill -15 $dictdpid 2>&1 > /dev/null
        fi  
        rm -f $DICTD_PID_FILE
    ;;  
    *)
        echo "Usage: dictd.init { start | stop }"
    ;;
esac
exit 0

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