The Dictionary Server Protocol (DICT) is a TCP transaction based query/response protocol that allows a client to access dictionary definitions from a set of natural language dictionary databases. dictd(8) is a server which supports the DICT protocol. dictzip(1) is a compression program which creates compressed files in the gzip format (see RFC 1952). However, unlike gzip(1), dictzip(1) compresses the file in pieces and stores an index to the pieces in the gzip header. This allows random access to the file at the granularity of the compressed pieces (currently about 64kB) while maintaining good compression ratios (within 5% of the expected ratio for dictionary data). dictd(8) uses files stored in this format.