dictd
dictd is an online dictionary client and server.
Contents
Installation
Install dictd from the official repositories.
Configuration
Hosting Offline Dictionaries
dictd can be configured to host offline dictionaries using localhost
as the server.
FreeDict provides dictionaries compatible with dictd and are available through the Arch User Repository.
As an example, the dict-freedict-eng-spaAUR package installs an English-Spanish dictionary.
After installation, in order to access the newly installed dictionary, start the dictd.service
:
# systemctl start dictd.service
And now the English-Spanish dictionary can be queried by executing:
$ dict
dictd.services
must be restarted in order to refresh the list of available dictionaries. In other words, a$ dict -I
-d
flag. To query the English-Spanish database, for example, for the word "free" you can use:
$ dict -d eng-spa free
Installing Additional Dictionaries
Additional dictionaries are available in the Arch User Repository through the search term dictd
. For example, dict-wnAUR is an English-English dictionary.
After installing the new dictionaries, make sure to restart the dictd.service
to refresh the available dictionary databases.
# systemctl restart dictd.service
Troubleshooting
Parse Error
The following error:
/etc/dict/dictd.conf:25: syntax error, unexpected $end /etc/dict/dictd.conf:25: #LASTLINE /etc/dict/dictd.conf:25: ^ dictd (yyerror): parse error parse error
Means that dictd
cannot find a dictionary database. These can be added manually to /etc/dict/dictd.conf
. For example:
database eng-spa { data /usr/share/dictd/eng-spa.dict.dz index /usr/share/dictd/eng-spa.index }
Adds the English-Spanish dicitonary installed by dict-freedict-eng-spaAUR. For other dictionaries, copy and pase the above database declaration but make sure to change the database name, i.e. eng-spa
, and also change the data
and index
paths above to specify the right files.
Graphical front ends
There are various graphical applications that can access dictd
through the DICT protocol. One of which is: goldendict.