freedict/fd-dictionaries

hand-written dictionaries from the FreeDict project

C

485

394 commits

updated Jul 5, 2026

See the code

README

FreeDict - free bilingual dictionaries

The FreeDict project aims at providing free (open source) dictionary databases, to be used both by humans and machines. The official home is at https://freedict.org, where you can find documentation for dictionary usage and development.

Dictionary Sources

This repository only contains dictionaries which are manually written. It is not the official FreeDict source. Please visit https://freedict.org/downloads to view all sources or https://download.freedict.org/generated for the imported/generated ones.

Development

All dictionaries are encoded in TEI (version 5) which is a flexible XML format to encode human speech. The FreeDict project provides dictionaries but also style sheets to convert the TEI databases into human-readable formats.

At the moment, the dict format and the SLOB format are supported.

The development documentation is in our wiki at https://github.com/freedict/fd-dictionaries/wiki.

Installation

You can install precompiled dictionaries on GNU/Linux distributions like Debian (and all derived distributions as Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) and Arch Linux. Please have a look at your package manager.

If you still want to build from source and you don't want to read the wiki, here's a really quick getting started guide:

  • Get https://github.com/freedict/tools, clone it to a path without spaces and set an environment variable called FREEDICT_TOOLS pointing there.
  • Change to your dictionary, try make help. For building make should be enough, at least if you have both tei2slob and xsltproc installed. It's also possible to disable some of the output formats, ask our friendly buildsystem for help: make help.
dictionaries
dictionary
tei
tei-xml

Contributors

humenda

212 commits

jimregan

40 commits

Joedalton2

33 commits

micha137

32 commits

freedict/fd-dictionaries

hand-written dictionaries from the FreeDict project

C

485

394 commits

updated Jul 5, 2026

See the code

README

FreeDict - free bilingual dictionaries

The FreeDict project aims at providing free (open source) dictionary databases, to be used both by humans and machines. The official home is at https://freedict.org, where you can find documentation for dictionary usage and development.

Dictionary Sources

This repository only contains dictionaries which are manually written. It is not the official FreeDict source. Please visit https://freedict.org/downloads to view all sources or https://download.freedict.org/generated for the imported/generated ones.

Development

All dictionaries are encoded in TEI (version 5) which is a flexible XML format to encode human speech. The FreeDict project provides dictionaries but also style sheets to convert the TEI databases into human-readable formats.

At the moment, the dict format and the SLOB format are supported.

The development documentation is in our wiki at https://github.com/freedict/fd-dictionaries/wiki.

Installation

You can install precompiled dictionaries on GNU/Linux distributions like Debian (and all derived distributions as Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) and Arch Linux. Please have a look at your package manager.

If you still want to build from source and you don't want to read the wiki, here's a really quick getting started guide:

  • Get https://github.com/freedict/tools, clone it to a path without spaces and set an environment variable called FREEDICT_TOOLS pointing there.
  • Change to your dictionary, try make help. For building make should be enough, at least if you have both tei2slob and xsltproc installed. It's also possible to disable some of the output formats, ask our friendly buildsystem for help: make help.
dictionaries
dictionary
tei
tei-xml

Contributors

humenda

212 commits

jimregan

40 commits

Joedalton2

33 commits

micha137

32 commits

Languages

C

48.3%

CSS

14.7%

Makefile

14.6%

XSLT

9.3%

Shell

8.8%

Yacc

2.3%

Perl

1.9%