Artha: A Useful Offline Dictionary Tool In Linux

If you are looking for a useful offline dictionary tool in Linux, then Artha would be a good choice. Based on WordNet, it works offline and can be used to look up meanings of words quickly.

This example uses the Linux Mint Cinnamon version.  To install it in Linux Mint, open the Terminal and type in:

Once installed, it will show up in the Accessories section.

It will then be available from the Linux Mint system tray also by default.

Looking up words with Artha:

Using Artha is simple. Click on it to open. On the first run, there will be a pop-up displaying the default hotkeys (Ctrl+Alt+W) to launch it that can be changed if needed.

The interface is simple to use, type in the words whose meanings need to be looked up.

Artha will auto-fill as you type in so you will have various choices.

Click on the Search button.

The meaning of the entered word will be displayed. Along with it will be the Relatives section. It would list various related functions like Derivatives, Domain, Kind of, Kinds, etc.

What it means is that if you would like to know more about how the queried words are associated as in their usage, their similar counterparts, and so on, you can get them from here.

Also, by clicking on the different types from the Relatives section, you can query and look up the meanings for those words.

Highlighting words from documents and web pages:

Besides typing in the words to look up, Artha can also be directly used with the hotkeys. Highlight the specific words from documents and web pages and use the hotkeys when Artha is open.

It will display the meanings for them.

Pretty cool.

Regular Expressions in Artha: 

A useful feature that Artha has is the support of Regular Expressions or regex. There are helpful resources for understanding regexes and also regex generators through which you can create your expressions.

Through regexes, you can filter various words in Artha using different possibilities. For example, you can list words that begin or end with certain letters using regex.

So, to find a list of words that begin as ‘algo’ and end with anything, use the regex query can be :

Similarly, to list words that begin as ‘algo’, end with ‘m’, and can have anything in between, the query can be:

Another example can be to query Artha to display all the words that end in ‘ym’. The query for that can be:

Artha settings: 

To change hotkey settings for Artha, click on the Settings icon from the menu and customize the hotkeys as needed.

Also, you can change the startup options and turn on/off polysemy count from here. This count classifies words into different categories based on how often they occur in speech like Rare, Common, etc.

Overall, Artha is a very useful dictionary tool for most of the common Linux distros. Do try it out.