[arooaroo]

This is bring back a lot of memories - in a former life I took care of digital products for dictionaries at Pearson Longman, and one of my favourite projects was developing a generic dictionaries platform for iOS apps, that allowed me to produce about eight dictionary apps published on the app store. All long gone now - no trace of them which is a shame.

The Longman brand was associated with English as a second language, so all our digital products came with audio pronunciations, plus a lot of photos/illustrations. In some products we also had a simple quiz engine to test comprehension. So a lot of data to cram into each app.

Like now, it seems that SQLite does a lot of heavy lifting. A lot of time was spent making a pipeline that could get lexicographic material in to a searchable database, plus the associated sound and image assets. I recall that the SQLite lib built-in to iOS wasn't good enough, so I had to compile my own build and bundle within each app.

The Longman dictionary data was really good. At the time a lot of the free dictionary apps were using WordNet (which isn't even a typical dictionary) because wikitionary wasn't where is it now. I bet there are more avenues to acquire decent, free, lexical resources.