Almost one and half years ago I read an interesting post on Irreal, and – as a great fan of the English language – I immediately went to the original post it mentioned. I did not regret it; I return to that post from time to time, since it is so beautiful, even poetic.
Of course, I started using Webster’s dictionary right away. (Especially with my habit of learning a couple of new English words on a daily basis.) But it being available in a web browser (and somehow eww choked on it), it was rather inconvenient for me, and hence I forgot to use it more and more.
And one day I found it’s gone from the Internet. I hoped that the server was temporarily down or something. Alas, it seemed to be dead. It was no more. It had ceased to be. It was an ex-server. (SCNR.)
Happily, Somers’ post mentioned a possibility of downloading Webster’s dictionary. I did that, discovered it being in some strange format and promptly forgot about it.
Until a few days ago, when I recalled all that and decided to do something about it. Mind you, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary is not bad, but it can’t compete with Webster’s. I was quite determined to find a way of accessing the One True Dictionary from within the One True Editor. And so I did.
So, without further ado, here’s how you do it (at least on a GNU/Linux system).
~/.stardict/dic.sdcv, a command-line utility for accessing StarDict dictionaries. (On Arch GNU/Linux with yaourt, it is yaourt -S
sdcv.)sdcv package; it’s usable, but slightly broken. Get sdcv-mode from here instead and load it in Emacs.M-x
sdcv-search and confirm the selection with RET (or just say M-x
sdcv-search anywhere and type the word you want to check).