Dictionary in the Shell


Here's an easy tool to lookup definitions in a dictionary in your terminal.

Dict Protocol

You'll need the Internet, because it's not a local dictionary. And you'll need curl, or wget or something to make the network request.

Then choose a word to look up. Here, mine is "entail". Then run:

curl 'dict://dict.org/d:entail'

Who knew there was a dict protocol!

Client for Protocol

If you don't want to curl directly, there's a nice cli client for the dict protocol called, what else, dict. Install:

sudo apt install dict

Then run:

dict entail

And get some sweet stdout to feast the left side of your brain on.