Yesterday, I mentioned that the 1913 + 1828 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary that used to be hosted by the University of Chicago appears to be permanently offline. Back in January, I wrote that I had emailed the site asking whether they were planning on putting the dictionary up again. Sadly, I never heard back and the dictionary is still off-line so, as I said yesterday, we have to assume it’s gone for good.
Happily, as I also mentioned, Marcin Borkowski has a nice post on how to get a copy of the dictionary and make it accessible from Emacs. That was always the end goal for me anyway so I spent about 5 minutes following Borkowski’s steps and installed a local copy. I had hesitated before because I didn’t have all the build tools to compile sdcv but since I stopped being stubborn and embraced homebrew, that was no longer a problem.
If you liked McPhee’s method for improving his prose and you want your very own copy of the dictionary that you can access right from Emacs, it’s really easy to get it. Just follow the steps in Borkowski’s post. Even if you’re not an Emacs user, sdcv and the dictionary source will get you a local copy that you can query from the command line. Perhaps there’s a plugin for whatever editor you’re using that can integrate it for you.