Substituting The Free Dictionary

[Mæstro]

Since 2019, I had been consulting the many subject dictionaries (not just the general dictionary of English) available on The Free Dictionary. They had become an integrated part of my research for many years. For a while, I noticed that certain VPN servers would cause the site to throw up Cloudflare, but I could always navigate round this by choosing the right VPN servers until today. This appears no longer to work. Sometime today since 2p, when I last accessed the site normally, Farlex decided to restrict the whole site, whether using a VPN or not. This is rather disappointing for me, for obvious reasons. Assuming it persists, I can (or at least should) no longer rely on it in the way I have for years. It is possible for me to access it after temporarily enabling scripts and cookies and some cross-site requests, and survives after disabling the former, but I do not wish to encourage such practises.

I have already arranged by now to access another website, Encyclopedia.com, through Internet Archive mirrors instead of directly, using DuckDuckGo site: queries to browse the site instead of the native search, as a workaround, and this method adapts in principle to Farlex, but it is tedious. Thankfully, Encyclopædia Britannica still works. Unfortunately, Collins’ independent site excludes IPA pronunciations, and my other dictionary with IPA (Pons) broke itself earlier this year, leaving me without an easily acessible dictionary which gives British pronunciations in IPA. I might also find myself browsing the archived version of Infoplease more often also, or even running an old version of Encarta. I could seek out machine-readable (not .epub) editions of the subject dictionaries in question for searching. This is not the first casualty among research sites this year (Oxford References and Bibliography preceded it), but it is the most prominent. Would you have any other proposals on how to ease the tedium for me to consider? (Please note that I do not consider wikis acceptable substitutes.)

If I am mistaken about the facts and one of you can access The Free Dictionary with JavaScript disabled, please let me know about this also. That would be valuable information in itself.

[Gemmaugr]

The Free Dictionary didn't work at first, without javascript, but I wanted to see what's what and enabled it as usual to see what first and third party content it used. And I was met with a cloudflare prompt. After solving it, I can disable javascript and it seems to work.

[Mæstro]

The Free Dictionary didn't work at first, without javascript, but I wanted to see what's what and enabled it as usual to see what first and third party content it used. And I was met with a cloudflare prompt. After solving it, I can disable javascript and it seems to work.

You are right, hence:

It is possible for me to access it after temporarily enabling scripts and cookies and some cross-site requests, and survives after disabling the former, but I do not wish to encourage such practises.

But we know how Cloudflare has been in the past, and finding actual substitutes for the site would be wise in any case.

[jarsealer]

https://yourdictionary.com works with first-party JS and XHR enabled. You can also use https://merriam-webster.com without JS if you search for words using the PM search plugin. They're also not cloudflared.

[Mæstro]

Sorry, but only a dictionary without any JavaScript at all is suitable for me. Because Merriam-Webster uses US English, it is likewise not suited for me, as noted in my original post, although the site itself is fine. (Although The Free Dictionary also includes some US dictionaries, for general use, I would use the Collins English Dictionary, which is British.)

[Gemmaugr]

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictio ... h-english/

https://github.com/wooorm/dictionary

[Mæstro]

Cambridge should indeed serve. I have used its site a few times before, shunning it mostly because its UI is inferior to Farlex’s, but this was the reminder I needed for casual lookups. Thank you! I am also looking into many offline mirrors of dictionaries, which would be ideal. The Archive possesses scanned editions of many of the books, including subject dictionaries and technical encyclopaedias, which I liked to consult with Farlex.

(WordAPI would be quite interesting, but alas, it appears only to give US pronunciations for certain words. Because I rely on these dictionaries especially for pronunciation, this is important. )

[Moonchild]

Yeah I was about to say why use an online dictionary when there are very capable offline ones available? In mt translation job i almost always kept a digital offline dictionary application running. Normally takes hardly any resources. Of course I kept some printed ones handy as well for more difficult lookups not covered by affordable digital solutions.

[jarsealer]

I have a 2004 Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary book, for british and american english. It apparently came with a CD-ROM inside, but I don't have it since it wasn't mine first. I rarely read it though, and find that searching on Merriam-Webster is faster.

[Mæstro]

I agree with Moonchild. Offline editions are best. (I have even got a few subject dictionaries in print here, mostly in German, as well as bilingual dictionaries for English, French, Latin and Esperanto.) CD versions of my usual general encyclopaedias (as opposed to subject dictionaries) have been easy to locate. One actually includes MW, but the failure to use IPA or specify which pronunciations are standard in Britain make it unfit for this purpose. I could find the 1996 edition of the OED available as CD-ROM, which meets all my needs but for its rather spotty coverage of proper nouns: England, Norway and Turkey have entries, but not France, Germany or Scotland. I know it was once common practise to stuff these into biographical and gazetteer appendices, but if present on the disc, I cannot find them. (Of course, Collins has got its own gaps, mostly to do with leaving derivative forms undefined and unpronounced, even if, as in polygonal, the accent moves.) Moreover, I could find an e-book version of Collins, but searching through it is tedious if the same word also appears elsewhere than its own entry. Oxbridge’s and others’ CD dictionaries explicitly for English learners have, in my experience, lacked the kind of comprehensive coverage I seek, so I still consider the search ongoing, but I have made good progress thus far.

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Something went wrong with my OED installation today. I have no idea how this happened.
Happily, I have kept an instance of the VM saved with OED installed and running legibly, and Farlex gave me a birthday present today in restoring access without Cloudflare. Either that, or installing the bypass Cloudflare with Firefox cookies extension, without any further configuration, worked. In any case, I can stop bashing my head on such things for a while, and arrange for offline substitutes at my leisure.