Somewhere in 2014–2015, I came across James Somers’ beautiful article on Webster’s 1913 dictionary and why it’s the right choice. It was a revelation to me, opening my eyes to a wonderful resource that ever since has helped me find just the right word when I’m writing. I loved the article and even put it in my “blog ideas” queue although I felt that it wasn’t something most Irreal readers would care about.
In that, as in so many other things, I was completely wrong. In 2015, I finally found a hook for the post—DuckDuckGo bang shortcuts—and published Draft #4 about it. That article and the others in the series have, judging by engagement, turned out the be arguably the most popular posts in the Irreal corpus.
It probably seems strange have a series of articles on this subject but it was necessitated by the disappearance of the dictionary from the University of Chicago website and a desire to make it available from within Emacs. Somers’ article itself has proved to be tremendously popular—Somers says it has been read over 130,000 times—and people are constantly discovering and commenting on it. There always seems to be something new to report about it.
The latest thing was something I’ve just discovered: As of Emacs 28.1 you can access Websters 1913 from within Emacs without loading any packages or data. That’s really great because it means, essentially, you get the dictionary for free. The above post gives you the TL;DR on how to do that.
There turns out to be more to the story and, of course, Mickey over at Mastering Emacs has all the details. The new Emacs capabilities depend on a client/server protocol for dictionary lookups that Emacs implements in dictionary.el. There are more capabilities than the dictionary-search function that I wrote about. There are also some navigation shortcuts to make moving around easier. If you prefer local copies of your dictionaries, you can arrange to run a server on your own machine. Take a look at Mickey’s post for all the details. The short story is there’s a lot more to dictionary.el than I thought.