Good English dictionary in Linux

Alien_Hominid · 04-01-2006, 12:15 PM

Does anybody know a good English dictionary for linux?
I have one installed with Gnome but somehow word web search doesn't work. Of course, I could try to run my windows dictionaries with wine but they don't seem to work very stable.

dive · 04-01-2006, 12:19 PM

If all else fails:

http://dictionary.reference.com/ and
http://thesaurus.reference.com/

gilead · 04-01-2006, 12:40 PM

If it's for spell checking, do you have aspell installed?

Alien_Hominid · 04-01-2006, 12:45 PM

Yes, I have. But it's mostly used for finding meanings of words which I find reading some technical literature.

rickh · 04-01-2006, 07:59 PM

Quote:

I have one installed with Gnome but somehow word web search doesn't work.

If the dictionary you have is not 'dict' ... use dict.

If for some reason dict will not connect to the internet for word definitions, you can easily install dict-server and whatever related dictionaries you need.

dennisk · 04-01-2006, 09:46 PM

Of course, you also have a dictionary as close as your browser.

http://www.google.com/features.html#definitions

dennisk

Alien_Hominid · 04-02-2006, 12:56 AM

I have Dictionary 2.12.2. Is this the same as dict?

rickh · 04-02-2006, 02:40 PM

Quote:

Dictionary 2.12.2. Is this the same as dict?

No, although I think that progran uses the dict servers. dict is the client which you can use from the terminal

Code:

$ dict google
3 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
  google \goo"gle\ n. (Computers)
     To search for Web pages containing a word or phrase, using
     the Google web site (www.google.com); as, I googled
     "ontology" and found 351,000 references. [recent]
     [PJC]

From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:
  google v. [common] To search the Web using the Google search engine,
     `http://www.google.com'. Google is highly esteemed among hackers for its
     significance ranking system, which is so uncannily effective that many
     hackers consider it to have rendered other search engines effectively
     irrelevant. The name `google' has additional flavor for hackers because
     most know that it was copied from a mathematical term for ten to the
     hundredth power, famously first uttered as `googol' by a mathematician's
     nine-year-old nephew.

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:
  Google
          <World-Wide Web> The {World-Wide Web} {search engine} that
          indexes the greatest number of web pages - over two billion by
          December 2001 and provides a free service that searches this
          index in less than a second.

          The site's name is apparently derived from "{googol}", but
          note the difference in spelling.

          The "Google" spelling is also used in "The Hitchhikers Guide
          to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, in which one of Deep
          Thought's designers asks, "And are you not," said Fook,
          leaning anxiously foward, "a greater analyst than the
          Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and
          Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single
          dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand
          blizzard?"

          {Home (http://www.google.com/)}.

          (2001-12-28)

The server program is named dictd, and if it is installed (with associated references) your 'Dictionary 2.12.2' program will use this as it's (first) source.

Alien_Hominid · 04-02-2006, 02:56 PM

Code:

$ dict
-bash: dict: command not found

Will need to get this. Looks good. Thanks for your help.

mjjzf · 04-03-2006, 06:39 AM

You can use StarDict with the dictionaries linked to at the site.

Alien_Hominid · 04-03-2006, 08:12 AM

OK. Will try and this.

Alien_Hominid · 04-04-2006, 09:52 AM

Thanks for all suggestions. Now I have better dictionary in Linux than I could have in Windows. It's Longman Dictionary and it is fabulous that this dictionary is free. Similar dictionaries for Windows in my country cost lots of money.
I appreciate all yours support.

rickh · 04-04-2006, 10:07 AM

It's still online, as opposed to living on your system, and it's fill of ads, but if it fills your need, that's a good thing.