Hi all - Can anyone who writes a bit point me towards a dictionary app that I can purchase/download that will 'live' on my machine so I can use it when I am not on-line? For that matter any information on an encyclopaedia app that I can install on my machine would also be welcome.
Thanks for your time - jaredR

Aspell: http://www.linuxhowtos.org/Tips%20an...llchecking.htm

As regards having an offline encyclopedia, there are some programs that provide wikipedia offline. They typically download a large compressed snapshot of wikipedia to your harddrive, to access offline. I once installed kiwix, and it worked okay. But other offline wikipedia programs have been mentioned on the ghacks site too.

For an offline dictionary, you might consider gnome-dictionary, opendict, or xfce4-dict - the all provide similar features, but differ slightly in their presentations. For offline access, they also need dictd (a dictionary server) installed. The nice thing about dictd is that some standard dictd dictionaries (such as dict-wn, dict-foldoc, dict-gcide, dict-jargon, and dict-moby-thesaurus) are avail to install from most repos. Much easier than having to fosick about the net looking for dictionary files of the right format! Elsewise, the dictd dictionary server runs in the background, and gnome-dictionary etc. are clients that forward their queries to it. These howtos may be helpful...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=145949
http://linuxers.org/howto/how-make-g...y-work-offline

The other main Linux dictionary program to consider is stardict, which I haven't really used. It is talked about more here.

I recommend dict and the server, dictd. You'll have to download the word database too. It's all free and you don't need an internet connection. Just use a command line and type "dict your_word" and it spits out everything. If you want help setting that up I did it not very long ago, just say so and I'll help you configure and download what you need.