burningtyger/farhang-app

Farhang is a web-based dictionary application. Rather than being a dictionary itself, it provides a clean and simple interface for searching and browsing dictionary content that lives in a database. You can see it in action powering a German-Persian dictionary at farhang.im, and the full database of entries from that site is freely available to download. The project is built in Ruby using Sinatra and Sequel, which are tools for creating web applications and talking to databases. It uses SQLite as its database engine, and relies on a component called ICU to handle proper text searching for languages that use non-Latin scripts. This is what enables accurate searching across different alphabets and character sets, which is essential for something like a German-to-Persian dictionary. Someone running a niche or community dictionary project would use this to get a working search interface up and running without building everything from scratch. For example, a team maintaining a bilingual reference for two languages that don't typically get commercial dictionary products could load their word entries into a database and use this app to let visitors look things up online. The project is explicitly designed to work with other dictionaries beyond the original German-Persian one, so it is flexible for different language pairs. One notable wrinkle is the ICU setup. Getting proper search to work requires compiling a small C library on the server where the app runs, and the exact steps can vary depending on the system. The README acknowledges this can be finicky and points to a forum post for troubleshooting. This means deploying it requires some comfort with low-level system configuration, not just standard web app deployment. The project is open source under MIT and Creative Commons licensing, and the creator welcomes forks of both the code and the dictionary data.