DICT

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 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:

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:

cURL

dictc (DICT Client), client for Windows written in Delphi.

dict.org's own client (part of the dictd package)

dictem, for the Emacs text editor

Dictionary, 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

GNU dico's own client (part of the dico package)

Kdict, comes with KDE

KTranslator, KDE dictionary

MaemoDict, for the Nokia 770

Mozdev.org's 'dict', a Firefox/Mozilla extension

OKDict, an OpenOffice.org extension

OmniDictionary, for Mac OS X

sdcv

StarDict

ZopeDictDB for Zope from Pentila

GoldenDict

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 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.