This package provides a client application to query a dictd server. The client-server protocol is TCP-based; the server may then be local or accessed through the network.

The DICT Development Group maintains several public servers which can be accessed from any machine connected to the Internet. The default configuration is to query one of these servers first. This may be changed in the configuration file /etc/dictd/dict.conf.

Queries may be customized by numerous command line options, including specifying the database(s) to be queried and the search strategy to be used.

This package also provides dictl, which allows using UTF-8 encoded dictionaries with terminals that do not support UTF-8.