GNOME Dictionary, also called gnome-dictionary, is a DICT client written in C by Emmanuele Bassi and others. It is part of the

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

desktop suite. It allows users to look up words in various dictionary sources. gnome-dictionary was at first an independent

DICT DICT is a dictionary network protocol created by the DICT Development Group in 1997, described by RFC 2229. Its goal is to surpass the Webster protocol to allow clients to access a variety of dictionaries via a uniform interface. In section 3 ...

protocol client called gdict, created by Bradford Hovinen, Spiros Papadimitriou and Mike Hughes; it was included inside the gnome-utils meta-package during the 1.x release cycle. As a companion to the original application was also added an

applet In computing, an applet is any small application that performs one specific task that runs within the scope of a dedicated widget engine or a larger program, often as a plug-in. The term is frequently used to refer to a Java applet, a program ...

for

gnome-panel GNOME Panel is a highly configurable taskbar for GNOME. It formed a core part of the desktop in GNOME 1 and GNOME 2. It has been replaced in GNOME 3 by default with GNOME Shell, which only works with the Mutter window manager. There are many '' ...

. After the 2.0 release of GNOME, due to lack of direct maintainership, the code base of gdict passed the point of being maintainable. In October 2005, the current maintainer of gnome-dictionary Emmanuele Bassi decided to rewrite the application and applet from scratch, removing the old (and mostly deprecated) code. The new gnome-dictionary was added to GNOME during the 2.13 development cycle and became part of the 2.14 GNOME release. It supports multiple dictionary sources, printing the definitions found and saving them to a text file, and has a simpler user interface. The logic of the application and the applet has been moved inside its own

shared library In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subro ...

called libgdict which can be used by third-party applications. As of July 2006 the development version of gnome-dictionary became feature equivalent to the pre-2.14 release, with the addition of the list of similar words found (also known as ''speller'').

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gnome-Dictionary DICT clients GNOME Applications Free dictionary software Language software for Linux Dictionary software that uses GTK Software that uses Meson