>For example, it is inadvisable to look up information about abortion from within some U.S. states, war crime in Russia, or democracy and human rights in China.<p>This seems to be an exaggeration. I live in Russia and just the word itself, "war crime", when taken alone out of conext, is safe and not punished for. Maybe I'm reading an article about American war crimes in Vietnam, who knows. I would never think it's dangerous to say this word. Unless it's a public statement, it's pretty safe. I don't know about China, but I doubt it's a huge problem in the US as well.
This seems like pointless scaremongering to me. Nobody's getting thrown into a re-education for looking up a word in a dictionary. This kind of cartoonish exaggeration of how totalitarian regimes operate only muddies the water on the actual harm done by such governments.
Why doesn't the author tell people to just got to <a href="https://dict.org" rel="nofollow">https://dict.org</a> in a browser, which is the default backend for the apps? SSL, POST queries, minimal and fast web output. Only javascript on the site is an old useless widget from a decade ago that bounced you to the internet strike of 2012. Works well even in elinks / links in a terminal if that's your thing, could probably whip up a cURL alias in minutes.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and noticed that wiktionary.org has an API, for example:<p><a href="https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page" rel="nofollow">https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page</a>
Use Wordnet [1,2].<p>It's an entirely local database with decent etymology and
provisions for synonyms, homonyms, semantic relations
and so on.<p>> $ /usr/bin/wn hacker -over<p><pre><code> Overview of noun hacker
The noun hacker has 4 senses (first 1 from tagged texts)
1. (1) hacker -- (someone who plays golf poorly)
2. hacker, cyber-terrorist, cyberpunk -- (a programmer who breaks
into computer systems
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet</a><p>[2] <a href="https://wordnet.princeton.edu/download/current-version" rel="nofollow">https://wordnet.princeton.edu/download/current-version</a>
One of the quality-of-life things I really miss about MacOS when using KDE is the dictionary quality, and in particular the ability of Apple to include random technical words (aplanatic?), recognise foreign words being used out of context (I like Dansk øllen) and silently correct things like German obscure capitalisation rules.<p>Unfortunately, aspell / hunspell just aren't in the same ballpark – and not just because of the lack of words. I think the dictionaries are much smaller and it's harder to set up this kind of weird, but very useful, behaviour.
> "So, why is this a problem for dictionary lookups?", you might ask. Some knowledge is forbidden knowledge, depending on your local authorities. For example, it is inadvisable to look up information about "abortion" from within some U.S. states, "war crime" in Russia, or "democracy" and "human rights" in China.<p>Ill-advisable to look up linguistic information? Has there been a single precedent that would justify such claim?
A basic windows 10 install takes up 32GB of disk space.<p>Funny that Linux distributions aren't just shipping a local dictionary to protect their users privacy.
No, stop using them without installing the daemon and desired dictionaries. Your distro should provide them as first-class packages, Debian has for as long as I can remember.<p>It's fantastic having instantaneous `dict` queries at the CLI, regardless of my connectivity status. The enhanced privacy is just a bonus over this already very real benefit.
>For example, it is inadvisable to look up information about abortion from within some U.S. states, war crime in Russia, or democracy and human rights in China.<p>Not sure about Russia or China, but it is not illegal to look at the definition or spelling of abortion in the US.
It's true, but protocol is not very relevant. Because, you know, while Goolag Translate uses SSL/TLS, it still collects your queries. Being logged in makes things even worse. So, the only solution is to have an offline dictionary.*<p>* that does not send out "usage statistics", and, if it's paper book, make sure to not to leave fingerprints or indication of usage :)