Today I read a brilliant article about English dictionaries and how to use them. It was inspiring in its colorfulness use of words and very well written, it really left me with the feeling, I need to write more. It also had an appendix about how to set up an online version of it. But it uses MacOS of course, so I had to check what works on Linux, to get a dictionary running as well. Here it is:

On Linux there have been multiple Dictionaries out there. Some were discontinued or abandoned after legal conflicts, some were left because of better alternatives. So it looks like most people settled to use GoldenDict as the standard dictionary app to use.

So you can install it via apt like so:

sudo apt-get install goldendict

Since that sparking article really left me with the desire to use the Webster dictionary from 1913, we have to download this as well. Luckily in the appendix of that article James provides an Download link to his MacOS App which contains what we need. This is an archive containing a tar.bz2-archive within the dictionary folder which we extract somewhere, our GoldenDict app can use it.

The last thing we have to do is teaching GoldenDict to use that specific dictionary. We can do that through the menu entry Edit -> Dictionary, hitting add, and choosing the directory of our previously extracted dictionary.

E voilá, if we search now within GoldenDict we get those really great definitions that really are interesting to read and explain so colorful, that a word really means.