Opening DICT Files

The DICT file type is primarily associated with Virtual PC.

DICT	File extension: DICT
	File type:	dictionary data file

What is a DICT file?

DICT files mostly belong to Virtual PC by Microsoft. DICT files are associated with the DICT dictionary network protocol developed by the DICT Development Group.

• Main Use: DICT network protocol was created to outdo the Webster protocol thereby making more dictionaries available to clients. The dictd server created by the DICT Development Group uses a specific file format with the DICT extension. Dictionary files following the DICT dictionary network protocol consist of two files, the DICT file, and a corresponding INDEX file. The DICT files, if compressed will then be seen with the DICT.DZ extension. These files are compiled using the dictfmt program.
• Other Uses: DICT files are associated with the virtual machine hosting application, Microsoft Virtual PC. The Microsoft Virtual PC application facilitates the running of a multiple virtual Windows OS in the same system. The DICT files used by this software consists of dictionary related information like word definitions, pronunciations, and example use cases. DICT files can also words belonging to other languages such as German and French. The DICT files on a Windows PC are normally located in the \Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Virtual PC\ directory.

How to open a DICT file

You need a suitable software like Virtual PC from Microsoft to open a DICT file. Without proper software you will receive a Windows message "How do you want to open this file?" or "Windows cannot open this file" or a similar Mac/iPhone/Android alert. If you cannot open your DICT file correctly, try to right-click or long-press the file. Then click "Open with" and choose an application. You can also display a DICT file directly in the browser:. Just drag the file onto this browser window and drop it.

Online DICT Text Viewer

Choose your .dict file to analyze

or drag and drop it here

Online File Viewer

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DICT file format:

The file format determines how the data is stored in the file. The file format can be deduced from the file extension and the signature. File extension, signature and file format must match; otherwise errors will occur when the file is opened. If there are problems opening a file, you must first determine the file format used. Our examination of the DICT files comes to the following conclusion:

DICT is a very commonly used file extension and is used by many programs, each with its own file format. The following file formats are most commonly found in DICT files:

• 10% of all DICT files start with the magic bytes 9B C1 3A FE, which are always the first bytes of this file format. The contents of these files cannot be read by a human; only a computer program can interpret the data. A typical file size is 1 MB. This file type is based on cutting-edge technology. Several words can almost always be found in the files, e.g. dictionary, locale, version, main, description and date. main_en.dict is a typical file name. Files like these have the following tags: history, emoji, user, dictionary, personal, contacts, pure and email.
• 9% of all DICT files are based on the well-known UTF-16 (LE) file format. UTF-16 (LE) is an character encoding system for Unicode. UTF-16 files can be viewed in any modern text editor. These files start with the two bytes FF FE, the so called byte order mark (BOM). These files are binary files, so they do not contain text, but only cryptic characters. The average file size is 1 KB with most files being between 130 bytes and 13 KB in size. Such files are related to export, germany, german, approved, xlsx and glossary.

The remaining 81% of all DICT files are files with no common format, the following 40 formats can be found: ZIP, SQL, UTF-8, XML, plist, GZIP, database, fsa, MEMO, zero, bout, Keyoti, cCI and CwdStudio. Files like these are sometimes linked to words, custom, fcitx, pinyin, greedy or system. If you want to find out what your DICT file contains, drag and drop it onto this page.