About wget

This WWW interface to Webster's English Dictionary was implemented by Thomas Hallgren.

The implementation

The implementation of wget is really simple. It consists of

• A CGI script wget.cgi written in Bourne Shell. This script invokes
  • A small C program wget.c to search the dictionary. Simple, portable and reasonably efficient.
  • Another small C program whtml.c that turns all words into links to their definition in the dictionary.
  • The program agrep to produce a list of similar words when an entry for a word is not found in the dictionary.
• The dictionary itself web.raw (a 14MB text file with 59430 entries). I don't know where this came from, but presumably it is an old edition of the dictionary for which the copyright has expired. If you want, you can get it in compressed form: web.raw.gz (5MB, compressed with gzip) or web.raw.bz2 (4MB, compressed with bzip2).
• A file web.words containing just the words defined in the dictionary (580KB). (This can be generated from web.raw.) This is the file searched by agrep to find similar words. It is also used by whtml.c to avoid creating links to non-existing words.

Known problems

• The dictionary file (web.raw) has line breaks in stupid places (in the middle of words).
• The programs wget.c and whtml.c do not do the right thing with phrases containing more than one word. You can not look up, e.g., ad hoc.

Other English dictionaries on the web

The category References : Dictionaries : English in Yahoo lists several other English dictionaries available on the web.

Dictionaries for other languages can be found in the category Reference : Dictionaries : Language.