[2] Its goal is to surpass the Webster protocol to allow clients to access a variety of dictionaries via a uniform interface.
In section 3.2 of the DICT protocol RFC, queries and definitions are sent in clear-text, meaning that there is no encryption.
Nevertheless, according to section 3.1 of the RFC, various forms of authentication (sans encryption) are supported, including Kerberos version 4.
The protocol consists of a few commands a server must recognize so a client can access the available data and lookup word definitions.
For example, the Unix command: will compile a Unicode-compatible DICT file called mydict, with heading My Dictionary, from mydict.txt which is in Jargon File format i.e.: Once the dictionary file has been produced, it can be easily installed on a server with commands similar to this: In order to efficiently store dictionary data, dictzip, an extension to the gzip compression format (also the name of the utility), can be used to compress a .dict file.