Gnome-dictionary was at first an independent DICT protocol client called gdict, created by Bradford Hovinen, Spiros Papadimitriou and Mike Hughes;[2] it was included inside the gnome-utils meta-package during the 1.x release cycle.

After the 2.0 release of GNOME, due to lack of direct maintainership, the code base of gdict passed the point of being maintainable.

In October 2005, the current maintainer of gnome-dictionary Emmanuele Bassi decided to rewrite the application and applet from scratch, removing the old (and mostly deprecated) code.

It supports multiple dictionary sources, printing the definitions found and saving them to a text file, and has a simpler user interface.

As of July 2006 the development version of gnome-dictionary became feature equivalent to the pre-2.14 release,[4] with the addition of the list of similar words found (also known as speller).