Contents of this page:
GCIDE is the GNU Project's publication of CIDE, the Collaborative International Dictionary of English. It is a freely-available set of ASCII files containing the marked-up text of a substantial English dictionary (131,566 headwords).
From GCIDE's README file:
This dictionary was derived from the
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
Version published 1913
by the C. & G. Merriam Co.
Springfield, Mass.
Under the direction of
Noah Porter, D.D., LL.D.
and has been supplemented with some of the definitions from
WordNet, a semantic network created by
the Cognitive Science Department
of Princeton University
under the direction of
Prof. George Miller
and is being proof-read and supplemented by volunteers from around the
world. This is an unfunded project, and future enhancement of this
dictionary will depend on the efforts of volunteers willing to help build
this free resource into a comprehensive body of general information. New
definitions for missing words or words senses and longer explanatory notes,
as well as images to accompany the articles are needed. More modern
illustrative quotations giving recent examples of usage of the words in
their various senses will be very helpful, since most quotations in the
original 1913 dictionary are now well over 100 years old.
You can find out more about GCIDE at MICRA, Inc's home page, GCIDE's project page, and GCIDE's home page. The latter provides a form for searching the dictionary text.
GCIDE uses a markup notation that is almost, but not quite, XML. I figured it would be more useful as a well-formed XML document, so I undertook the conversion. The result is GCIDE_XML. It's possible that, at some point in the future, GCIDE itself will be published in XML, at which point this website will become redundant.
Here's all of GCIDE_XML in a single zip file (14 Mb, 58 Mb uncompressed).
The "root file" of the XML document is gcide.xml.
It declares and references two frontmatter files, and then 26 letter files.
gcide.xml also contains a complete DTD for the document.
Formerly, it only declared character and external entities;
now it includes element type declarations
and attribute-list declarations.
Please note that the element type declarations
have been generated from the existing document,
and thus are somewhat inelegant.
If you're wondering what the tags mean, see GCIDE's tagset.txt file.
From the introduction to each file in GCIDE:
GCIDE is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
GCIDE is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this copy of GCIDE; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
Since GCIDE is made available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, GCIDE_XML is necessarily also published under those terms. See the file gpl.txt or http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.txt.
For a while in the mid-1990's, the Free Software Foundation had its own project to put a large English dictionary online. You can read about the GNU Dictionary Project here.
Web page by Michael Dyck (jmdyck@ibiblio.org).
History of this page:
gcide.xml now contains a complete DTD. Also, fix some primordial markup typos in gcide_c2.xml.Web space generously provided by ibiblio