{"id":5885,"date":"2017-01-22T13:41:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T18:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=5885"},"modified":"2017-01-22T13:56:11","modified_gmt":"2017-01-22T18:56:11","slug":"the-right-dictionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=5885","title":{"rendered":"The Right Dictionary"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, I wrote about James Somers’ beautiful post on why you are probably using the wrong dictionary<\/a>. The right dictionary, it turns out, is the 1913 + 1828 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. You can read my original post and Somers’ to find out why that’s true. <\/p>\n

Sadly, the University of Chicago site that those posts mentioned and that the DuckDuckGo bang shortcut !webster<\/code> took you to is now offline. It’s even disappeared from DNS so I’m losing hope that it will return. I emailed the responsible folks but have not heard back from them. All we can do is check back with the site once in a while. <\/p>\n

Well, actually we can do more. Marcin Borkowski (mbork) was a user of the dictionary and displeased with its demise. Fortunately, he’s figured out a way to download the dictionary and read the StarDict format that it’s encoded in<\/a>. Even better, he’s figured out how to read it from Emacs. It’s pretty straightforward. You just download the files, unzip them into ~\/.stardict\/dic<\/code>, install the sdcv<\/code> application, and finally install the sdcv-mode package for Emacs. Even if you’re not an Emacs user you can use sdcv<\/code> as a command line tool. <\/p>\n

The only hassle is sdcv<\/code>. If you’re on a Mac like me it’s hard to get compiled. That’s most likely because I’m using Clang rather than gcc. Happily it’s available with Homebrew<\/a> and the link even tells you how to load Homebrew if you don’t already have it. <\/p>\n

If I learn anything more about the original site, I’ll make a followup post. In the meantime, mbork’s solution is probably better because it’s integrated into Emacs and you have a local copy so you don’t have to worry about sites going offline. If you only occasionally use the dictionary and don’t want to bother loading a local copy, you can find sites offering the 1913 version. Here’s an example<\/a>. I haven’t found a site offering both versions like the University of Chicago site did. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago, I wrote about James Somers’ beautiful post on why you are probably using the wrong dictionary. The right dictionary, it turns out, is the 1913 + 1828 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. You can read my … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18,129],"class_list":["post-5885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5886,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5885\/revisions\/5886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}