As a writer, I rarely need to look up the definition of a word. If I don’t know a word, I’m not going to risk using it. However, I frequently check that the word has the exact nuance I want. If it does not, I turn to a thesaurus to search for a closer alternative. Unfortunately, a regular dictionary is next to useless for these purposes. That is why I was pleased to discover dict, which not only has the information needed for such purposes, but runs from the command line for added efficiency.

A client for the DICT dictionary network protocol, dict essentially searches several dozen databases and returns comprehensive results in seconds. It is available for major distributions, but note that each database is often in a separate package in distro repositories and must be installed separately from the basic command. The option --dbs (-D) will show a list of these databases, as will the web version of dict (Figure 1). The databases supported by dict include a number of dictionaries, a thesaurus, a collection of acronyms, the Jargon File, the CIA World Factbook, and 34 other languages besides English – far more than the average dictionary offers. The result is not only the range of literal meanings, but numerous contexts as well. Some default results for the word “red” from my current installation are shown in Table 1.

This amount of information makes for intensive scrolling, so dict used with only the basic command and a search term should usually be used with a pager like less or cat. Another option is to specify a specific database, so that only the relevant results are given, using the option --database (-d) DATABASE. For instance

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