Looking Up Definitions Directly in the Terminal

sdcv (Stardict under Console Version) is a cool and useful command line program to define words directly in the terminal, and it’s available in both the main Arch and Debian repositories. The dictionaries themselves, however, must be downloaded separately. Here are the steps I took, along with the alias I setup in my .bashrc file.

• Install sdcv
  sudo pacman -Sy sdcv or sudo apt-get install sdcv if you’re using a Debian-based distro.
• Next download your preferred dictionary from here download.huzheng.org. I used this one.
• The dictionary needs to be extracted into a specific folder that sdcv knows where to look.
  I had to create this folder myself: /usr/share/stardict/dic
• Now, extract the dictionary to the folder that was just created
  sudo tar -xjvf stardict-dictd_www.dict.org_gcide-2.4.2.tar.bz2 -C /usr/share/stardict/dic

Now you can run “sdcv” from within a terminal and it will prompt you to enter a word you’d like to define. Alternatively, you can run sdcv [word to define]

I also created an alias for sdcv so that I can simply type “define” and the word to get a definition. This can be done by adding the following to your .bashrc file in your home directory:
alias define='sdcv'

Thanks for reading. Feel free to send comments, questions, or recommendations to hey@chuck.is.