19 Open-source Free English Dictionary Apps

Hazem Abbas

Aug 21, 2023 — 8 min read

Photo by Edho Pratama / Unsplash

English dictionary apps are useful for anyone who needs to look up the definition of a word quickly and conveniently. Some advantages of using dictionary apps include:

Portability: You can have access to a dictionary anytime and anywhere with your phone or tablet.
Speed: Searching for a word in a dictionary app is often faster than flipping through the pages of a physical dictionary.
Additional features: Many dictionary apps include additional features such as audio pronunciation, example sentences, and synonyms.

Whether you are a student, a language learner, or simply someone who enjoys reading, an English dictionary app can be a valuable tool.

In this post, you can find the best open-source dictionary projects, that you can download, install and use for free.

1- List Of English Words (479k Words)

This repo offers a text file containing 479k English words for all your dictionary/word-based projects e.g: auto-completion / autosuggestion. The data comes in JSON format, and in text format. It also offers an example as in Python script.

2- Open-Source English Dictionary (176,023 definitions)

An open source English language dictionary with 176,023 definitions.

This is based on the Source Forge Project: MySQL English Dictionary , which in turn in based on the The Online Plain Text English Dictionary (OPTED) dictionary.

OPTED is a public domain English word list dictionary, based on the public domain portion of "The Project Gutenberg e-text of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary" which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

3- List of the Most Common English Words

The Unix dictionary contains far too many ridiculous words that even Google has trouble explaining, such as zuurveldt, cholecystenterorrhaphy and nonly:

$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
235886

4- wiktionary-dict

This project collects bilingual Wiktionary dictionaries in DSL-format, based on the work of Wiktionary User:Matthias_Buchmeier.

The scripts used to convert these dictionaries can be found here, and the original source files and other information can be found on the project homepage on Wiktionary.

5- ipa-dict - Monolingual word lists with pronunciation information in IPA

This project aims to provide a series of dictionaries consisting of wordlists with accompanying phonemic pronunciation information in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription for as many words as possible in as many languages / dialects / variants as possible.

Supported formats include: Raw data, JSON, CSV, XML and several other formats.

The included languages are: Arabic, German, Esperanto, Finish, Japanese, Khmer, Korea, Dutch, French, Persian, Romanian, Swedish, and many more.

6- Syng: Chinese To English

Syng is a free, cross-platform, open-source, Chinese-To-English and English-To-Chinese dictionary. Syng is your study assistant to help you learn Chinese no matter where you are in your journey.

Syng v2 is now in beta. Please be patient as features get ported over from v1. In addition to a new interface, Syng v2 includes numerous under-the-hood enhancements on top of v1 that enable the possibility of more advanced features.

7- Simple Dictionary

An offline English to English dictionary with spell suggestions using the open source dictionary data. It is built on top of Java, and comes with HTML interface.

8- Saladict (Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox)

Saladict is an all-in-one professional pop-up dictionary and page translator. It supports mixed use of multiple search modes.

Saladict

Saladict is an all-in-one professional pop-up dictionary and page translator which supports multiple search modes, page translations, new word notebook and PDF selection searching.

Saladict

9- FreeDict

The FreeDict project strives to be the most comprehensive source of truly free bilingual dictionaries. They are not just free of charge, but they give you the right to study, change and modify them, as long as you guarantee others these freedoms, too. FreeDict nowadays provides over 140 dictionaries in about 45 languages and thanks to its members, grows continuously.

FreeDict is avaiable to download for Windows, and GNU/ Linux.

Home — FreeDict

10- Dictionary API

A Free headless Dictionary API for developers. The API usage has been ramping up rapidly, making it difficult for me to keep the server running due to increased AWS costs.

11- English Dictionary (Android)

An open-source free English dictionary for Android, written in Java. It features word search, TextToSpeech option, SQLite database backend, and Search History.

12- En Dictionary

A Web App Dictionary For Getting Word's Meaning / Examples / Pronounciation Using cam-dict. It is an open-source free project that is released under the MIT license.

13- English Idioms for Italian and Spanish People

A collection of the most common English idioms with their related Italian and Spanish translation.

14- Russian English dictionary

A dynamic web application of English-Russian dictionary with accessibility. Built with React and Skyeng API. I built this project to improve my understanding of React and Redux.

15- Mercury (iOS)

Mercury is a free iOS English dictionary.

16- Dictionary (Vietnamese and Japanese)

This is a responsive single-page-app dictionary using Angular and Bootstrap. Currently, it supports English-Vietnamese dictionary and going to support Japanese-Vietnamese dictionary.