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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

what's the stardict format? which edition of the oed are you hosting? i scanned the first edition decades ago but i don't think there's a reasonable plain-text version of it yet

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StarDict (a program/file format) is easily googlable. A bit of a rabbit hole is that it's been chased around hosting providers because its site (used to) offer downloads of copyrighted dictionaries, including the OED 2nd edition. I don't know how these files were originally obtained or produced. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20230718140437/http://download.h...

Edit to add: Also, "i scanned the first edition decades ago" sounds like quite a story. 13 volumes? What project were you doing?

oh, i just thought it would be good for the public-domain dictionary to be available to the public: https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg001...

It will be the 2nd edition which is freely available on the internet with all of the usual copyright concerns.

And it's already in 'dict' format so I didn't need to convert.

At least one of the illegal copies was supposedly converted using a version of "oed2dict": https://njw.name/oed2dict/ which creates various formats.

That takes HTML files as input, and I don't know where those are found. ISOs of CD-ROM editions from 1996 and 2009 are online, but it looks like an adventure to install the software and/or extract the data.

The trouble with piracy is that provenance is so shaky, with plenty of chance for bugs or alterations...

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