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Why I built a dictionary app

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Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#161

Post by kworks »

cal85 wrote: post #151
kworks wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

James Somer's excellent blog post (and mcphee-draft-no-4) provoked a fundamental shift in the way I rewrite. Can't understate its effect. Not the least of which is that I now turn to the 1913 Webster's several times a day. Agreed that the UI on the present iOS app is less than ideal. That said easy mobile access to those sublime definitions is super helpful. Gratitude to the dev. Will definitely be using Wordnote (gr…

> Agreed that the UI on the present iOS app is less than ideal. Which one do you use? I think there might be a few that use 1913 Webster's. I use this one [1]. It could be a lot better, but it works. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/websters-writers-dictionary/id...

Yes that's the one I use. Totally functional but agreed it could be better. Grateful for the app all the same.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#162

Post by billyzs »

wanted a dictionary app that tracks the words I looked up too. ended up writing an iOS short that queries an online dictionary and posts the word to an ifttt webhook which then adds the word to an airtable. with a bit of manual work, the card view in Airtable can even function as a rudimentary flash card. it's pretty basic and never going to have fancy features such as spaced repetition, but hey not bad for not writing a single line of code

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#163

Post by 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.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#164

Post by srad1292 »

I recently hit the same wall of finding good, freely-available dictionary data. My family and I like to play Quiddler here and there(where you get cards and build words with them) and I wanted to make a Quiddler solver that would take your hand/top card in discard and would give you a list of the best combination of words by total points, by word length with points as a sub sort, and by number of words with points as a sub sort. I found multiple sources of JSON data with inconsistent formatting or missing information. I mainly wanted the list of words and what the word type of each definition was so I could quickly filter out words that didn't have a whitelisted type. I ended up settling with just a Scrabble dictionary which was a list of strings and manually removing words here and there as they came up if they didn't belong. Understandable that the big names in dictionaries spent a lot of resources getting to where they are. That said, it's hard to believe something as fundamental as a record of our language doesn't have an open source and well-organized dataset accessible by API or download.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#165

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

JackFr wrote: post #32
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strange take. They won't they would fund some other org or dept to do the work. Same way you have a public education system, or public health care.

A dictionary is a creative, curated and editorial work. While I could see, in the US for example, the National Endowment for the Humanities supporting the work, it is very far removed from something like the National Institute if Standards and Technology. It is not a given that such work is best handled through the public purse.

It’s also not clear it won’t work.

Governments fund the arts all the time. Why is there automatically an assumption that this will end with the government editing the dictionary to control speech?

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#167

Post by elxr »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #159

> I was worried about the speed of react-native querying a 21MB SQLite database. I often have similar concerns when writing code. Then I remember that "normal" applications send the query over the network to another continent, where a server has to query a HUGE database, and relay the result back. It's amazing how we have such powerful devices, but are so accustomed to underestimating their capacity.

Agreed, wish that more software made use of local databases and storing more data client-side.

Yes it takes more space, but phones can affordably be configured with 256GB and laptops with multiple TB of high speed storage nowadays.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#168

Post by inkeddeveloper »

tiffanyh wrote: post #63
liquidise wrote: post #31

Well this is... eerie. I just released Stictionary[1] on Friday. It is an offline, ad free, dictionary that remembers words you look up. It gives a word of the day and provides (admittedly underfeatured atm) flashcards to review your word lists. It includes optional syncing to keep your word lists across devices. I've been holding off posting about it while i complete the website[2]. Love to see someone else had such…

Why does Apple App Store say your app is 4 years old if you just released it this past week? Same goes for the OP?

Nice try being cheeky.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#169

Post by chii »

jobigoud wrote: post #127
8191 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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.

Re: Why I built a dictionary app

#170

Post by rags2riches »

zimpenfish wrote: post #90
rags2riches wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking up words is not stupid. Misusing words because you assume you know what they mean, that is stupid.

> Misusing words because you assume you know what they mean, that is stupid. But if you're sure you know what it means (albeit incorrectly), because that's what you've picked up or been taught and no-one has ever corrected or queried you, where would the impetus to look it up in a dictionary come from? You might have a case for "deliberately misusing words [...] is stupid" but there's a long comedic and literary trad…

Isn't simple curiosity enough of an impetus? Wanting to now the etymology, alternative or similar words or phrases?

I also think there is a shared sense of how fancy, big or difficult a word or phrase is considered. Look up the fancier words more often!

Another possibility of course is wanting to correct somebody else, but double checking the definition just to be sure before you do!

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