Time moves on and things you thought you knew turn out to be not as accurate as you hoped. This happened to me recently in regard to using the Webster 1913 dictionary in Emacs. I recently posted about James Somers’ article on Webster’s 1913 and how to use it from withn Emacs. In it I repeated my advice to follow Marcin Borkowski’s recipe for making this wonderful resource available from within Emacs.
In the comments to that post, acdw and Brian Green note that the dictionary is now available from dict.org and that—as of Emacs 28—you can access it from the built-in dictionary-search. That means that any Emacs user can take advantage of this splendid resource without downloading extra packages or data.
If you call dictionary-search without configuring anything, it will prompt you for the dictionary source with a default of dict.org. As Green says, you can avoid that by simply adding
(setq dictionary-server "dict.org")
to your init.el.
That will give you all the definitions from Weber’s 1913 as well as the other dictionaries located at dict.org. If you’re coming to this post without the benefit of reading the backstory, you should definitely read Somers’ post, You’re probably using the wrong dictionary to see why you should bother with Webster’s 1913 to begin with. It is not, after all, the most modern dictionary but as Somers explains, it is the best if you’re looking for just the right word.
UPDATE : Fixed link to previous post.