New project: Webster's 1913 Dictionary website

A new side project from me: Webster’s 1913.

It’s a static website serving the complete text of Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary from 1913.

James Somers wrote a popular blog post about Webster’s 1913, explaining how its definitions are more vivid and literary than what you’ll find in a modern dictionary.

There already exists another site, that I sometimes use, websters1913.com, but unfortunately it has an SSL cert issue, and is not very feature-rich.

I decided to build my own version, with a few additional features:

• Linkified cross-references.
• Tooltips to explain abbreviations and language codes.
• Client-side autocomplete search.

How it works

The dictionary text comes from the public-domain GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English (GCIDE), which descends from the 1913 edition originally digitized by Project Gutenberg.

There are two halves to the project:

1. A data pipeline that parses the GCIDE source files (SGML-ish, with some non-standard quirks) into JSON — one file per headword.
2. An Astro static site that pre-renders one HTML page per entry at build time. No server, no backend, no JS on entry pages.

Browse the dictionary →

Code is here.