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I suspect it’s more likely they have a bunch of internal frameworks for creating, accessing, and distributing simple databases (something akin to SQLite).

So the difficulty we’re seeing here isn’t deliberate obfuscation, but rather just an dev using a database structure to make app design and word lookup easier.

If there really was licensing concerns I would expect there to at-least be some basic encryption, not just some basic compression.

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Apple use regular SQLite for a whole bunch of other applications, such as Apple Photos. I wonder why they didn't use it here?

The dictionary app (and hence its database) may go all the way back to NeXTStep/Openstep.

Maybe not all of it. But I wouldn't doubt if bits of it went all the way back to the early days where a fancy dictionary was one of the star features of NeXTStep.

The underlying file format and associated libraries are probably largely unchanged from the NeXTStep era. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

http://toastytech.com/guis/ns20mail.png

(Edit: beaten by 30 seconds!)

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