That doesn’t make any sense. A alphabet is a list of valid characters. A dictionary is not just a list. Even in a language like Chinese where individual characters carry meaning, a dictionary tells you what that meaning is. It’s not just a list of characters.
Or to echo article, the dictionary is made out of weights.
A list of words isn’t a dictionary. What a dictionary adds over a list of words is all the relationships between the words needed to interpret them and use them, and all of that is in the weights.
Amusingly for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/325776830 , the last place to use /usr/dict (Debian, which changed it in 1998; Berkeley having changed it in Net/2 in 1991) stopped doing so years before Wikipedia was invented.
Sure, but the fact that people are doing something isn't evidence that it isn't a mistake. Also they may be stuck due to concerns about backwards compatibility. There may be games and utilities they are shipping, that come from upstreams, that rely on these files.
A mapping of Chinese characters to integers (like a tokenizer) would not be a dictionary. You’d also need definitions. At best it’s an index to a hypothetical dictionary.
It's beside the point and so I only note it out of interest, but the Chinese writing system doesn't use an alphabet (or a syllabary like Japanese kana), it's logography.
Or to echo article, the dictionary is made out of weights.