Find a source of dictionary data about vocaba HOT 1 OPEN

Further thinking:

The final size of the dictionary is a concern. What do you think is an appropriate amount of storage for a vocabulary app to use?

The Wiktionary English-only dump comes out to 2.2GB (too big). However, its data has all kinds of cruft: translations, etymology, hyperlinks, etc. I wrote a script to cut it down to only what I expect we'll use (though I didn't do a very careful job, so consider this an estimate) and reduced to 195 MB (~91% reduction) uncompressed. This is without paring down words (which I expect would be a significant but time consuming optimization).

This puts us well within the App Store's size limits (500 MB executable, but 4 GB total size) to the point where we don't need to worry about that.

This is definitely something worth examining more closely eventually. Perhaps ideally:

• Dictionary is compressed, and hosted by us (free tier)
• App downloads dictionary separately, after being installed (other language dictionaries optional?)
• After being decompressed, dictionary only takes 200MB storage

For now, I'm not worried.

from vocaba.