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DICT

Dictionary network protocol

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In section 3.2 of the DICT protocol RFC, queries and definitions are sent in clear-text, meaning that there is no encryption. Nevertheless, according to section 3.1 of the RFC, various forms of authentication (sans encryption) are supported, including Kerberos version 4.

The protocol consists of a few commands a server must recognize so a client can access the available data and lookup word definitions. DICT servers and clients use TCP port 2628 by default. Queries are captured in the following URL scheme:

dict://⟨user⟩;⟨auth⟩@⟨host⟩:⟨port⟩/⟨c⟩:⟨word⟩:⟨database⟩:⟨strategy⟩:⟨n⟩

Dictionaries using the DICT protocol

Repositories of source files for the DICT Development group's dict protocol server (with a few sample dictionaries) are available online.

Dictionaries of English

  • Bouvier's Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856)
  • CIA World Factbook
  • Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897)
  • Elements database
  • Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
  • GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English (GCIDE)
  • Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary
  • Jargon File
  • Moby Thesaurus
  • Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
  • The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
  • The U.S. Gazetteer (1990 Census)
  • V.E.R.A. – Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms which are used in the field of computing
  • Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
  • WordNet

Bilingual dictionaries

  • Big English–Russian Dictionary
  • English–French dictionary
  • Freedict provides a collection of over 85 translating dictionaries, as XML source files with the data, mostly accompanied by databases generated from the XML files in the format used by DICT servers and clients. These are available from the Freedict project web site at.
  • FREELANG Dictionary
  • Lingvo English–Russian and Russian–English dictionaries are not free, but when purchased, can easily be converted into DICT format
  • Mueller's English–Russian dictionary
  • Slovak-English legal dictionary
  • Slovak-Italian legal dictionary

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