drae

The Spanish dictionary of the Real Academia Española (RAE) in your terminal: definitions, etymology, synonyms and antonyms, and full verb conjugation.

$ drae casa
casa
Del lat. casa 'choza'.

1. f. Edificio para habitar.
   Una casa de ocho plantas.
   Sin.: vivienda, inmueble, domicilio, hogar, residencia, piso, apartamento…

2. f. Edificio de una o pocas plantas destinado a vivienda unifamiliar, en
   oposición a piso.
   Quieren vender el piso y comprarse una casa.
   Sin.: chalé, chalet

Every lookup is stored in a local cache, so the second time it answers instantly and offline.

The tool is meant for Spanish speakers, so its commands, flags and messages are in Spanish; the code is in English.

Install

git clone https://git.all.ar/pub/drae-cli.git
cd drae-cli
cargo install --path .

This puts the drae binary in ~/.cargo/bin.

Usage

Command	What it does
`drae casa`	Defines a word
`drae definir sin`	Defines a word that clashes with a command name
`drae sin casa`	Synonyms and antonyms, sense by sense
`drae conjugar hablar`	Full conjugation, including voseo
`drae conjugar ser --modo subjuntivo`	A single mood
`drae dia`	The RAE word of the day
`drae azar`	A random word
`drae buscar edificio`	Searches inside the definitions already cached
`drae cache info \\| listar \\| limpiar`	Manages the cache

Global options:

Option	What it does
`--json`	Prints JSON instead of formatted text
`-a`, `--abreviaturas`	Expands the marks: `f. = nombre femenino`
`-A`, `--actualizar`	Ignores the cache and downloads again
`--sin-cache`	Neither reads nor writes the cache
`--ancho N`	Output width in columns
`--color auto\\|always\\|never`	When to use color
`--fuente auto\\|dle\\|rae-api`	Where to read from

Color turns itself off when the output goes to a pipe or when NO_COLOR is set.

When the word does not exist

The closest words are looked up in the system hunspell dictionary, offline and ignoring accents:

$ drae arbol
drae: «arbol» no está en el Diccionario
  ¿quiso decir árbol?

Where the data comes from

What	Source
Definitions, etymology, synonyms	rae-api.com, which serves the content of the Diccionario de la lengua española as JSON
Conjugation	Spanish Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
Suggestions	`/usr/share/hunspell/es_*.dic`, local

dle.rae.es is an optional source (--fuente dle). The site answers every non-browser client with a Cloudflare challenge, so it almost never responds from a terminal; its HTML reader is kept, and tested against a fixture, in case it gets through on your network.

Conjugation comes from Wiktionary rather than the RAE for the same reason, with a bonus: it includes voseo («vos hablás»), which the RAE tables leave out.

$ drae conjugar ser --modo subjuntivo
Modo subjuntivo
  Presente
    que yo sea · que tú seas · que vos seas, seás · que él/ella/ud. sea ·
    que nosotros seamos · que vosotros seáis · que uds./ellos sean

rae-api.com allows 10 requests per minute. The cache hides that, but keep it in mind if you look up many words in a row.

Configuration

Optional, in ~/.config/drae/config.toml. Everything has a default and command-line options always win over the file.

fuente = "auto"        # auto | dle | rae-api
timeout = 15           # seconds per request
ancho = 80             # defaults to the terminal width
# cache = "~/.cache/drae/entries.db"
# diccionario = "/usr/share/hunspell/es_AR.dic"

Development

cargo test          # 70 tests, none of them touch the network
cargo build --release

The DLE reader is tested against tests/fixtures/dle-casa.html, a real page trimmed down, so it stays verified even while the live path is blocked.

License

MIT. The dictionary content belongs to the Real Academia Española; the conjugation tables come from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA.