[zehfernandes]

Hey Hacker News!

I'm thrilled to read all the comments with ideas and improvements. I will try to answer and keep up with the thread.

Kudos to all the similar initiatives trying to solve the problems I outline in the article. It's wonderful to see a zeitgeist about dictionaries.

Who wants to jump the article and try the version I built, feel free to download the iPhone [1] or Android [2] version or run it by itself with the open source repo [3]

1: https://apps.apple.com/app/wordnote-dictionary/id1596537633

2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zehfernand...

3: https://github.com/zehfernandes/wordnote

Cheers!

[8191]

How did you manage to get the dictionaries for all those languages? If I didn’t miss it, that part is left open in the article after explaining how highly priced they are…

[jobigoud]

From the article: "I landed on the freeDictionary API that uses the Wiktionary as a source.".

[chii]

Why didn't they just download the dumps via https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/ (as explained in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Help:FAQ#Downloading_Wiktiona...)

Scraping, even via an api, is way less efficient imho.

[gnubison]

They’re in wikitext, which looks to be considerably less semantic than the crawled data. I’m not sure that’s the reason, but it could be a reason.

[chii]

I'd say not the reason, since the wiki text is pretty semantic. the wiki source of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/subbureau#English is:

  ==English==

  ===Etymology===
  {{prefix|en|sub|bureau}}

  ===Noun===
  {{en-noun|s|subbureaux}}

  # A [[district]]-level public security bureau in [[China]].

so as long as one can parse wikitext, it's split pretty well up!