Data structure

dictpress is language agnostic and has no concept of language semantics. It stores all data in a Postgres database in just two tables entries and relations. To make a universal dictionary interface possible, it treats all dictionary entries as UTF-8 strings that can be accurately searched with Postgres DB's fulltext capabilities by storing tsvector tokens alongside them. The tokens that encode and make the entries searchable can be anything—simple stemmed words or phonetic hashes like Metaphone.

Postgres comes with built-in tokenizers for two dozen languages (\dFd to see the full list on psql).

• There can be any number of languages defined in the dictionary. eg: 'english', 'malayalam', 'kannada' etc.
• All content, the entry words and their definitions, are stored in the entries table
• Entry-definition many-to-many relationships are stored in the relations table, represented by from_id (entry word) -> to_id (definition word), where both IDs refer to the entries table.

Database tables

entries

Field	Type
id	SERIAL	Automtaically generated numeric ID used internally
guid	TEXT	Automtaically generated unique id (UUID) used in public facing APIs
content	TEXT	Actual language content. Dictionary word or definition entries
initial	TEXT	The first "alphabet" of the content. For English, for the word Apple, the initial is A
weight	INT	An optional numeric value to sort search results in ascending order
tokens	TSVECTOR	Fulltext search tokens. For English, Postgres' built-in tokenizer gives to_tsvector('fully conditioned') = 'condit':2 'fulli':1
types	TEXT[]	Types of content as defined in the content. Eg {noun, propernoun}
tags	TEXT[]	Optional tags
phones	TEXT[]	Phonetic (pronunciation) descriptions of the content. Eg: {ap(ə)l, aapl} for Apple
notes	TEXT	Optional additional textual description of the content.
status	ENUM	enabled (show the entry in search results), disabled (hide from search results), pending (public submission pending moderator review)

relations

Field	Type
from_id	INT	ID of the head word or the dictionary entry in the entries table
to_id	INT	ID of the definition content in the entry table
types	TEXT[]	Types defining the definition as defined in the config. Eg {noun, propernoun}
weight	INT	An optional numeric value to order definition results
tags	TEXT[]	Optional tags
status	ENUM	enabled (show the entry in search results), disabled (hide from search results), pending (public submission pending moderator review)
notes	TEXT	Optional additional textual description of the content.