This one uses dictionary.com

Note: 1) Replace 'wonder' with any word you looking the meaning for in the above example 2) Need to install these packages: wordnet & wordnet-base (latter should be automatically installed because of dependency) 3) Combined size of packages is about 30MB on my old ubuntu system (I find it worth it) Show Sample Output

wget -qO - "http://www.google.com/dictionary/json?callback=dict_api.callbacks.id100&q=steering+wheel&sl=en&tl=en&restrict=pr,de&client=te" this does the actual google dictionary query, returns a JSON string encapsulated in some fancy tag sed 's/dict_api\.callbacks.id100.//' here we remove the tag beginning sed 's/,200,null)//' and here the tag end There are also some special characters which could cause problems with some JSON parsers, so if you get some errors, this is probably the case (sed is your friend). I laso like to trim the "webDefinitions" part, because it (sometimes) contains misleading information. sed 's/\,\"webDefinitions.*//' (but remember to append a "}" at the end, because the JSON string will be invalid) The output also contains links to mp3 files with pronounciation. As of now, this is only usable in the English language. If you choose other than English, you will only get webDefinitions (which are crap).

Some snippets posted are slow on big dictionaries, this one is fast. Show Sample Output

This restricts things 3 ways: 1. No capitalized words, hence no proper names. 2. No apostrophes. 3. Restricts size to range (3,7) Show Sample Output

Updated to the new version of the MW webpage (seems MW does not use cougar anymore, so the other commands do not work nowadays), and using Xidel to parse the page with a html parser instead regex. Example usage: pronounce onomatopoetic I'm not sure how well Xidel works with binary streams (although it seems to work great in tests), so using wget to download the actual wav file might be safer, i.e.: pronounce(){ wget -qO- $(xidel "http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/$*" -f "replace(css('.au')[1]/@onclick,\".*'([^']+)', *'([^']+)'.*\", '/audio.php?file=\$1&word=\$2')" -e 'css("embed")[1]/@src') | aplay -q;} Xidel is not a standard cli tool and has to be downloaded from xidel.sourceforge.net

Runs on at least MacOS Sierra (in Bash) Show Sample Output