DICT is a Dictionary network protocol created by the DICT Development Group. It is described by Request for comment 2229. Its goal is to surpass the Webster protocol and to allow clients to access more dictionaries at the same time.
Several free dictionaries are available in the dict format:
Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
V.E.R.A.
Hitchcock s Bible Names Dictionary
WordNet
Jargon File
The Devil s Dictionary ((c) 1911)
Elements database
U.S. Gazetteer (1990)
Webster s Dictionary (1913)
CIA World Factbook
Easton s 1897 Bible Dictionary
the Freedict bilingual dictionaries
Combined, they make up the Free Internet Lexicon and Encyclopedia.
Some DICT protocol clients:
Kdict, comes with KDE
gnome-dictionary, comes with GNOME
dict.org s dict
[http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidictionary/ OmniDictionary], for Mac OS X
StarDict is a desktop dictionary. It doesn t support the DICT protocol directly. Instead, it provides a converter, which would imply that you need to store data twice if you want to use it both with the DICT protocol and with StarDict.
=External links=
[http://www.dict.org www.dict.org]
[http://luetzschena-stahmeln.de/dictd/index.php DICT protocol server list]
[http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2229.html RFC-2229], the actual definition of the DICT protocol
[http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/wik2dict wik2dict], a tool to download Wikipedia and Wiktionary database dumps and convert them into the dict format