Lookup Words from the Command Line Using a Simple Bash Script

Productivity Sauce

The humble nano text editor can be a rather handy distraction-free drafting tool, but now and then I need to look up words and their definitions in WordNet. To do that, I tweaked a simple Bash script I stumbled upon on the Stack Overflow Web site. The original script pulls data from the Google Define source, but it took just a few minutes to make it work with WordNet. So if you, like me, need to look up words and their definitions without leaving the terminal, here is a script that can help you with this:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Enter your word:"
read word

/usr/bin/curl -s -A 'Mozilla/4.0' 'http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s='$word \ 
| html2text -ascii -nobs -style compact -width 500 | grep "*"

For this script to work, you need to install curl and html2text packages. On Ubuntu, you can do this using the sudo apt-get install curl html2text command. Copy and paste the script text into a blank text file, save it as the wn.sh script, and make it executable using the chmod +x wn.sh command. Now you can run the script by issuing the ./wn.sh command.

Obviously, you can use this script with any other online resource. All you have to do is to replace the existing query URL with your own and tweak the parameters of the html2text command.

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