dictd - ArchWiki

# dictd

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The official website describes dictd as:

  Client/server software, human language dictionary databases, and tools supporting the DICT protocol (RFC 2229).

## Installation

Install the dictd package.

### Graphical front ends

There are various graphical applications that can access `dictd` through the DICT protocol. One of which is: GoldenDict.

## Configuration

### Locale

By default, dictd comes configured to use the en_US.UTF-8 locale. If your system does not have this locale compiled, dictd will fail to start without a helpful error message. It is likely that you want to configure it to use another locale in `/etc/conf.d/dictd`:

    /etc/conf.d/dictd

    DICTD_ARGS="--locale <your locale>"

### 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`.

And now the English-Spanish dictionary can be queried by executing:

    $ dict

Tip:

- A list of all the available dictionaries can be queried by executing:

    $ dict -I

- To query a specific dictionary database, you can use the `-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.

## 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 dictionary installed by dict-freedict-eng-spaAUR. For other dictionaries, copy and paste 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.

Category:

- Dictionaries