This WWW interface to Webster's English Dictionary was
implemented by
Thomas Hallgren
in the 1990s.
The implementation
The implementation of wget is really simple. It consists of
- A CGI script wget.cgi written in Bourne
Shell. This script invokes
- A small C program
wget.c
to search the dictionary.
Simple, portable and reasonably efficient.
- Another small C program
whtml.c
that turns all words into links to their definition in the
dictionary.
- The program
agrep
to produce a list of similar words when
an entry for a word is not found in the dictionary.
- The dictionary itself
web.raw
(a 14MB text file with 59430 entries). I don't know where
this came from, but presumably it is an old edition of the
dictionary for which the copyright has expired.
- A file
web.words containing just
the words defined in the dictionary
(580KB). (This can be generated from web.raw.) This is the file
searched by agrep to find similar words. It is
also used by whtml.c to avoid creating links to
non-existing words.
Known problems
- The dictionary file (
web.raw) has line breaks in stupid
places (in the middle of words).
- The programs
wget.c and whtml.c do not do the
right thing with phrases containing more than one word. You can not look
up, e.g., ad hoc.