RFC-2229 – A Dictionary Server Protocol | Hacker News Reader

RFC-2229 – A Dictionary Server Protocol

datatracker.ietf.org

45 pointsmindcrime15 comments

Interesting. We write technical reports for customers every 1-2 weeks, and since customers can have technologies ranging from the very ordinary to the quite unique, there are often a number of words not in the dictionary that everyone has to add to theirs (this does not include names/words invented by the customer themselves, of course those would not be in there). I've already put my dictionary in our git, but people would have to put their internal git credentials into customer VMs and then still manually pull to get my updates semi-live. A dictionary server would solve this, I had never even considered the concept might exist.

Someone linked dict.org below which searches a bunch of dictionaries. Rootkit is one of the words my default vim dict doesn't know, this website knows it! It pulls from the jargon file and has a good definition. Nice. But then the next attempt, versioning: nope.

Does anyone happen to know if there is a community-maintained dictionary somewhere? Surely I'm not the first person to run into this. It having a brand names section (e.g. GitHub not Github) and acronyms (e.g. DKIM) would be a big plus, as those together make up about 2/3rds of the entries of my current custom dict. (I'd share it here but it's made during work time so I don't hold the copyright thereto, although I assume if I ask $boss on Monday it would be fine to contribute this back to any open source dictionaries out there.)

Edit: I was looking at the sources of dict.org. This one is worth browsing through:

The Devil's Dictionary https://web.archive.org/web/20170121170915/http://wiretap.ar... (protip for looking up a specific word: search the page for the word plus a comma). Two favorites so far: "HATCHET, n. A young axe" and "EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me."

>Does anyone happen to know if there is a community-maintained dictionary somewhere?

I had the same question and saw KOReader[0] has the GNU dictionary [1] that is creative commons licensed. Oddly I don't think it is in git or accepting PRs or patches: they just say to email suggestions.

As an aside, I've had trouble trying to find a capable, free, Linux system friendly English-Esperanto dictionary for ages. It seems weird that there isn't an open source translated dictionary umbrella project.

[0] https://github.com/koreader/koreader [1] https://gcide.gnu.org.ua/0

The dictionary that dict.cc uses knows that versioning is a word, and has translations of it into other languages. I don't know what dictionary it is, nor if it contains definitions too.

>Does anyone happen to know if there is a community-maintained dictionary somewhere?

I remember seeing wikipedia being served over the dict protocol.

That would be quite useful as well, though again not without manual additions because not every word has a page (e.g. capacitances) and not every word on each page is spelled correctly (admittedly most are, but just two days ago I fixed a brand name capitalization typo). Perhaps with the addition of Wiktionary it would come a long way, though.

In general I have a lot of respect for pre-WWW, special-purpose protocol design. I don't see it as short-sighted, so much as the world wide web having been _that_ big a paradigm shift.

That said, the date on this one is from 1997. Amazon was already selling books via the Web at that point, so I'm not totally sure what the use case is.

so I'm not totally sure what the use case is.

That seems to be true for a lot of RFCs; a small number of them are so important and widely used that I've memorised their numbers (768, 791, 793, 821, 959, 1081, 2616, etc.) but then there's plenty of others which seem to have been merely "someone thought it was a good idea".

Mayhaps they were “Requests For Comments” rather than “International Standards” or “Specifications” with some sort of recognized enforcement body behind them?

It seems as though good “Walled Gardens” make “Good Neighbors”, so requests for comments may not be as important as they once were?

This seems the best chance to get an answer: What is my best option for a free, offline dictionary and thesaurus I can use from the terminal?

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Dictd

Curiously this standardized on utf8 already. Was it mainstream by 1997?

I found a web UI here with many databases. But not all databases seem to be selected by default, e.g. one first has to pick the right one to get a result for a Japanese word.

http://dict.org/bin/Dict

The web UI is handy, but what led me to this was messing around with the "dict" command line tool. I discovered that when I was randomly doing apt-cache search queries just to see if there was some sort of command line word lookup tool (it seems like a pretty obvious thing, in hindsight I'm not sure why I'd never looked before) and found "dict". That led me to wondering if there was a way to use wiktionary.org data with the CLI, which led to a reference to using the DICT remote protocol to connect to a DICT <-> Wiktionary Gateway (which wasn't actually working when I tried it. Bummer) and finding out that "dictionary servers" are a "thing" in the general sense.

Not sure how many servers are "out there" that support this, but dict.dict.org at least seems to work, which is pretty cool.

I had never heard of the "webster" protocol, and my DDG-fu has failed me. Can anyone point me to details?

Yeah, info on that seems a bit scarce. I managed to find one or two pages that talk about "webster servers" and "webster clients". Don't see a protocol spec anywhere though.

https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~bruncott/elisp/webster19-alpha....

http://www.verycomputer.com/35_13631dc2bdda24ce_1.htm

http://sepwww.stanford.edu/data/media/public/oldsep/scripts/...

http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/next/software/nextste...

Also it's mentioned in NeXT-FAQ

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