DICT Client/Server Software

Various pieces of client and server software that support the DICT protocol have been written. Here is a list of freely distributed software that we know about.

David Costanzo (david_costanzo@yahoo.com) maintains dict, a Firefox/Thunderbird add-on that queries highlighted words in a configurable set of databases/servers. The results pop up in a separate window, scriptable with CSS.

D. Mason wrote an addon for Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 4 and up) that allows a right click to look up a word. (the link seems dead – please let us know if you locate one that works)

C-based client/server software (including raw and pre-formatted databases), released in February 1998 under the terms of the GPL, is available for download from the official DICT sites listed on the servers page.

Steve Young has written a freely-available C library for interacting with DICT servers, libdict. Client applications can use a simple API to access the full functionality of a DICT server.

GNU Dico is an impressive server + client + WWW front-end suite, supporting several database formats. It is developed by Sergey Poznyakoff and Wojciech Polak.

Ho Ngoc Duc's JDictd can run on any computer where a Java runtime environment is available.

Luis Parravicini's JavaDict, with support for dictionaries stored in postgresql.

Jay Kominek's Jiten is a DICT server written in Perl. Using Perl for the server may make it easier to add support for other dictionary types, to access external database engines, and to test protocol extensions. Porting Perl to non-Linux/Unix systems should also be easier.

Radovan Garabik's serpento is a DICT server written in Python, currently in “alpha” release.

vOOcabulum is a new Open Office extension, coded by Ole Yansen. Currently at alpha. Testers sought!

John Goerzen has written a client and some extremely powerful formatting tools in Python.

Neil Bowers maintains Net::Dict (originally written by Dmitry Rubenstein), a class implementing a simple Dict client in Perl as described in RFC2229. It provides wrappers for a subset of the RFC2229 commands, and simple command-line and GUI clients using the module. You can download as Net-Dict-* from here.

Andy Bagdanov wrote a stand-alone DICT client in Perl. Distributed under the PERL Artistic License.

wdict is a Perl-based web interface to DICT.

Bret Martin wrote a stand-alone DICT client in Perl. This client is known to run under non-Linux/Unix operating systems. Distributed under the Netscape Public License.

Anders Johansson wrote a DICT client in Pike.

Jeff Kreis wrote a DICT client in Rebol.

Dave Pearson wrote a DICT client in Ruby (under the GPL).

A beta version of tkDict is available.

EMACS/XEMACS interface, by Aleksey Cheusov (dictd maintainer since 2002), extremely customizable dictionary client heavily using autocompletion.

EMACS/XEMACS interface, by Torsten Hilbrich, supports looking up definitions and searching for a match with a nice interface using both mouse and keyboard.

Dikt is a KDE dictionary client written in Qt. It is developed by Goran Tal.

Word Inspector by Scott Gifford is a graphical front-end to the “dict” program. The dict program allows you to search through one or more dictionary-like reference books for a word, then displays its definition. Word Inspector expands that by allowing you to enter words to look up more easily, easily look up words that appear in the definition for another word, and automatically look up a word in the X Window selection. You can download and install your own dictionaries, or use them over the Internet. It uses Gtk+ for its user interface, and was built with the Glade interface builder. It is not currently Gnome-aware, but is still a very useful addition to your Gnome desktop. Full Gnome support is intended for the next release. Word Inspector is licensed under the GPL.

GDict is a relatively new GPL'd client implementation of the DICT protocol.

ldict is a GTK frontend to DICT written in perl.

Kdict by Christian Gebauer (gebauer@bigfoot.com) is a graphical client for the DICT protocol. It enables you to search through dictionary-like databases for a word or phrase, then displays suitable definitions. Kdict features an integrated implementation of the DICT protocol that has support for all protocol features, a separate list of matching words for advanced queries, configurable database sets, a browser-like user interface, convenient interaction with the X-clipboard, configurable html-output and printing.

wapdict is a GPL'd client from Baris Efe that targets WAP devices. An example front end web site is available.

The Perl version of the DICT client ( dict.pl) has been run under NT and will probably work under any version of Windows that has an appropriate Perl installation.

Stephen Moshier provides binaries based on the Cygnus tools. See the the bottom of his web page.

D. Mason wrote an addon for Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 4 and up) that allows a right click to look up a word.

Aleks Ozolins wrote the Magical Jellybean Dictionary, a DICT client for Windows. The source code is available, too.

Ole Yansen rewrote the Magical Jellybean Dictionary in Delphi, and the result is dictc (DICT Client), available from Sourceforge.

Mac OS X DICT Howto, a step-by-step walkthrough by Jens Ropers

David Caldwell created a GPL'd DICT client for the Macintosh. The binary is available.

Navdeep Bains wrote the MacDICT client. MacDICT is currently available in binary form only, but the author does plan to make some source code available in the future.

The Omni Group has written OmniDictionary, a DICT client for Mac OS X. OmniDictionary is free, but source code is not available.

Bryan Lee has released the Open Source DictX client for Mac OS X. Binaries and GPL'd sources are available.