Easy offline dictd installation

Rationale

The dict command can easily be used with offline dictionaries. It suffices to install the dictd daemon with its dependencies alongside a local, offline dictionary. This turns out to be a much easier procedure than installing sdcv as suggested elsewhere on this page.

Installation

Below is shown how to install dictd along with the dict-gcide comprehensive English dictionary. There are many more dictionairies available from the standard repositories.

$ sudo apt-get install dict dictd dict-gcide

Usage

$ dict word

 3 definitions found

    From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

      Word \Word\, n. [AS. word; akin to OFries. & OS. word, D. woord,
         G. wort, Icel. or[eth], Sw. & Dan. ord, Goth. wa['u]rd,
         OPruss. wirds, Lith. vardas a name, L. verbum a word; or
         perhaps to Gr. "rh`twr an orator. Cf. {Verb}.]
         [1913 Webster]
         1. The spoken sign of a conception or an idea; an articulate
            or vocal sound, or a combination of articulate and vocal
            sounds, uttered by the human voice, and by custom
            expressing an idea or ideas; a single component part of
            human speech or language; a constituent part of a
            sentence; a term; a vocable. "A glutton of words." --Piers
            Plowman.
            [1913 Webster]

                  You cram these words into mine ears, against
                  The stomach of my sense.              --Shak.
            [1913 Webster]

                  Amongst men who confound their ideas with words,
                  there must be endless disputes.       --Locke.
            [1913 Webster]

         2. Hence, the written or printed character, or combination of
            characters, expressing such a term; as, the words on a
            page.
            [1913 Webster]

         3. pl. Talk; discourse; speech; language.
            [1913 Webster]

You probably also have aspell installed, which has the advantage of giving suggestions for misspelled words. You can call aspell directly on your text file with:

aspell check text.txt

or use it on a single word:

echo wrd | aspell -a

If you're just looking to see if a word is spelled correctly or exists, you can use grep to look through the word list files in /usr/share/dict/, which are provided by the appropriate wordlist packages. An example to see if "emu" is a valid word:

grep -i "^emu$" /usr/share/dict/american-english

That doesn't have any definitions, however.

You can use free dictionary with dict command:

• First install via sudo apt-get install dictd
• Find out which language dict you want to use sudo apt-cache search "dict-freedict"
• After find these names install them (for ex.) sudo apt-get install dict-freedict-eng-tur
• Check which languages are installed dict -D
• Use like: dict "word"
• Specific usage: dict -d fd-eng-tur "word"

How about downloading dictionary text file from the sites for example this link (warning: 4.5 MB), and then finding the text with command like grep "word" dictionary.txt

Or also by using VIM editor to search for the word with its command eg. /Word. And by pressing n or N for next or previous occurance of the pattern is more fun with finding meaning of the word.

I use the Princeton University WordNet application. I did not want to deal with Tcl/Tk so prepared a make file that allows you to run WN as a command line application. You do have to compile it, but I provide instructions to help somewhat. I personally find it automatic to popup a terminal on my Linux computer and type "wn unknown-word -over" anytime I want the definition for unknown-word. The nice thing about WordNet is that you get synonyms, antonyms and other linguistic nuances if you want it. Here is my github download link:

Dalton Bentley github link for WordNet command version

Incidentally, I edited all of the Princeton linguistic help files into a rational pdf which those interested in the more advanced capabilities will appreciate.