Freedict is a collection of free bilingual dictionaries, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 (GPL).

The primary format of the dictionaries is XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 complying to the Text Encoding Initiative

Text Encoding Initiative

The Text Encoding Initiative is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities. The community runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and maintains a technical standard, a wiki and a toolset....

 Guidelines. Most dictionaries have databases in the DICT

DICT

DICT is a dictionary network protocol created by the DICT Development Group. It is described by RFC 2229. Its goal is to surpass the Webster protocol and to allow clients to access more dictionaries during use...

 format. Other occasionally available formats include Stardict

StarDict

StarDict, developed by Hu Zheng , is a free GUI released under the GPL for accessing StarDict dictionary files . It is the successor of the program StarDic, developed by Ma Su'an...

, zbedic, Evolutionary Dictionary and Opendict. Some Linux distribution

Linux distribution

A Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...

s (such as Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

) provide the Freedict dictionaries as easily installable packages. StarDict

StarDict

StarDict, developed by Hu Zheng , is a free GUI released under the GPL for accessing StarDict dictionary files . It is the successor of the program StarDic, developed by Ma Su'an...

 can make a good front-end for daily use of Freedict.

As of November 2009, the project hosts 70 bilingual dictionaries of various sizes.

The dictionaries can be used via DICT

DICT

DICT is a dictionary network protocol created by the DICT Development Group. It is described by RFC 2229. Its goal is to surpass the Webster protocol and to allow clients to access more dictionaries during use...

clients (standalone and plugins, both locally and remotely), DICT WWW interfaces, and directly in a browser (source XML + CSS).

External links

• Official website
• SourceForge project page
• dict.org DICT Development Group. A WWW interface to, among others, Freedict dictionaries.
• Debian packages