Overview Over File Formats

This page attempts to give an overview about dictionary formats and a brief summary on their application. It's not extensive, but might help you getting an overview about current formats and previously developed projects.

Formats for end users

Dictd format (used by the Dictd server)

• Structure: indexed Headwords linked to a plaintext body
• Used by: [Dict Clients](Dict Clients) and [Dict Servers](Dict Servers), GoldenDict, GNOME Dictionary

StarDict

• Structure: see http://www.stardict.org/StarDictFileFormat
  • Supports HTML, XDXF and plain text
• Used by: StarDict, GoldenDict, GoldenDict by xiaoyifang, QStarDict, QDict (Android), SDCV (command-line)
  • Also see this list.

Slob

• Structure: Slob (sorted list of blobs) is a read-only, compressed data store with dictionary-like interface to look up content by text keys
• Used by: Aard 2

Interchange formats

TEI

• Used by: FreeDict
• Standardized format for linguistic exchange, see the pages of the TEI Group

XDXF

• Aims at providing a common file format for dictionary exchange, similar to FreeDict's approach to have a pivot format for dictionary distribution
• seems inactive