Build a customized DICT database

Prepare the original word-definition pair file (foobar.txt) in the following format:

:foo:definition of foo
:bar:definition of bar

Create the database (.dict, .index) using dictfmt

dictfmt --utf8 --allchars -s "Foobar Dictionary" -j foobar < foobar.txt

Move to the proper folder, and restart the DICT server dictd

mv foobar.dict foobar.index /usr/share/dictd/
/usr/sbin/dictdconfig -—write
/etc/init.d/dictd restart

You may have DICT client dict to do such query

dict foo