Command Line Dictionary

Ask Fedora
1

Hey, crowd knowledge!

I’m sick of switching to the browser to look up words/translations in a dictionary[1] while I mainly work on the command line.

Edit: I’m searching for translations. I want to look up a word, get a list of translations/synonyms, re-translate one of the results to see if it fits my need, or take another one.

There must be some solution as this is practically the most straight forward thing ever.

I came across sdcv in the Fedora Magazine but meanwhile, all the dictionary files (like stardict-dic-en) seem to be removed from the repository.

So – naturally – two questions arise:

  1. What’s up with sdcv – as it’s probably not the intended solution to scramble around the internet on a manual search for remaining dictionaries.
  2. Is there a successor that superseded it?

Thanks for any ideas!

  1. It’s slow and I’m bombarded with cookie or “support us“ messages. ↩︎

2

The package translate-shell should provide the requested features

$ trans -t de "command line dictionary"
command line dictionary

Befehlszeilenwörterbuch

Translations of command line dictionary
[ English -> Deutsch ]

command line dictionary
    Befehlszeilenwörterbuch, Kommandozeilen-Wörterbuch
3

The classic dictionary that I use on the CLI is dict:

No translations there, though, as far as I can tell. translate-shell is probably the best one for that.

4

Thank you for the hint, but I fear that translate-shell is insufficient:
This seems to be a wrapper around Google Translate and not using actual dictionaries.

Apart from Google and Bing, none of the engines work (out-of-the-box):

> trans -e yandex de:en bislang
[ERROR] Oops! Something went wrong and I can't translate it for you :(
> trans -e spell de:en bislang
[ERROR] No dictionary for language: de
> trans -e hunspell de:en bislang
[ERROR] No dictionary for language: de

And using Google gives insufficient results

> trans -e google de:en bislang
bislang
(bisláng)

so far

Definitions of bislang
[ Deutsch -> English ]

adverb
    hitherto
        bisher, bislang, bis jetzt
    until now
        bisher, bis jetzt, bislang

bislang
    so far, until now

if you compare it with a real dictionary. And apart from that, being able to use it offline would be nice.