Dictionary

Web dictionary in six languages, installable as a PWA — and it works with no connection at all.

https://fs-frost.github.io/dictionary

The index is always open

The word list sits next to the entry, the way the spine of a dictionary sits next to the page you are reading. The word you are looking at is marked in it, typing moves it before you even press Enter, and the arrow keys walk to the word next door — which is how you end up reading things you were not looking for.

The letter tabs go down the side, with a second level inside the current letter (ca ce ci co cu), because on their own A–Z is a jump of dozens of pages.

On a phone the same thing holds: the search box and the dictionary picker stay where they are, and the index folds away behind its own button.

It starts somewhere

There is a word of the day — the same on every device, worked out from the date, no account and no server — and a shuffle button that opens the dictionary at random, the way you would with a paper one.

Typing suggests words as you go, everything you look up is kept in Recent, and the star keeps a word in Saved. All of it lives in your browser; none of it leaves your device.

When a word is missing from the dictionary you are in, the app tells you if it is in one of the others and takes you there in one click.

Six dictionaries

Dictionary	Words	Definitions	Size
Español	Spanish	Spanish	19 MB
English	English	English	36 MB
Français → English	French	English	12 MB
Deutsch → English	German	English	13 MB
Italiano → English	Italian	English	10 MB
Português → English	Portuguese	English	10 MB

The four bilingual ones are named with an arrow because that is what they are: their definitions are written in English. That distinction is the whole reason they sit next to Español instead of replacing it — a Spanish dictionary glossed in English answers agua with "water", which is not a Spanish dictionary.

They are also offline only: no public API returns French glossed in English, so there is nothing to fall back to, and the app says so instead of pretending.

Offline first

The ~30,000 most frequent words of each language ship with the app: definitions, IPA transcriptions, and — for Spanish and English — etymologies, usage examples and synonyms. Looking a word up normally never touches the network.

Press Download for offline use and the whole dictionary is stored in your browser. After that it works on a plane, on the underground, or with the Wi-Fi off — including words you have never searched before.

The app asks the browser to keep that download permanently: by default anything a website stores can be thrown away to free disk space, which for an offline-first dictionary is the worst possible failure. The dictionary manager shows whether the browser granted it.

Downloads can be cancelled halfway, and a downloaded language can be removed again from the dictionary manager (the gear next to the download button), which also shows both languages at once, the connection status and how much space the site is using.

When a word is not in the bundled dataset, Spanish and English fall back to online sources. None of them requires an API key.

Dictionary	Order of lookup
Español	bundled dataset → rae-api.com → freedictionaryapi.com
English	bundled dataset → dictionaryapi.dev → freedictionaryapi.com
the bilingual ones	bundled dataset only

Spanish queries the RAE first because it defines words in Spanish; the Wiktionary-backed APIs serve English glosses and would answer agua with "water".

Light and dark

The theme follows your system by default. The button in the header cycles light → dark → system, tells you which one is active and confirms each change with a toast. The choice is remembered, and it is applied before the first paint so dark mode never flashes white on load.

Built with

• Svelte 5 and SvelteKit 2 with adapter-static
• Bootstrap 5.3, self-hosted — no CDN
• TypeScript and Zod
• Vite and Bun
• Vitest and Playwright
• Dictionary data from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (wiktextract)

Run locally

bun install
bun run dev

Go to http://localhost:5000.

Keyboard

Key
/	focus the search box
← →	previous / next word
↑ ↓ Enter	pick a suggestion

Commands

bun run check        # type and template checking
bun run test         # unit tests + dataset integrity
bun run test:e2e     # end-to-end, including a real offline run
bun run build        # static build into build/
bun run preview      # serve the build on http://localhost:5000

The end-to-end tests need a Chromium (bunx playwright install chromium). If you already have one, CHROMIUM_PATH=/path/to/chrome bun run test:e2e skips the download.

Regenerating the dataset

static/data/ is generated and committed. To rebuild it, download a wiktextract dump and a frequency list from hermitdave/FrequencyWords:

bun run dataset:es --input es.jsonl.gz --freq es_50k.txt
bun run dataset:en --input en.jsonl.gz --freq en_50k.txt

Use the eswiktionary/Español export for Spanish — the dictionary/Spanish one contains Spanish words glossed in English.

The bilingual dictionaries come from tdulcet/compact-dictionaries (JSON Lines, not compressed):

bun run scripts/build-dataset.ts --format compact \
    --lang fr --gloss en --name "Français" \
    --input dictionary-fr.jsonl --freq fr_50k.txt

Deploy

Pushing to master triggers the GitHub Actions workflow, which type-checks, runs both test suites, builds the site, rewrites the base tag to /dictionary/ and publishes build/ to the gh-pages branch.

Licence and attribution

Dictionary content comes from Wiktionary and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The bilingual dictionaries are built from tdulcet/compact-dictionaries, also Wiktionary-derived and licensed CC BY-SA / GFDL. Spanish definitions fetched online come from the Diccionario de la lengua española through the unofficial rae-api.com. Icons are from Bootstrap Icons (MIT), inlined as SVG.