Script to print entries from the Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM (v.4.0) to terminal. This eliminates the need to use the Flash-based executable included in the CD-ROM to view the contents. Note that this repository does NOT include any content from the dictionary's entries: it is only a helper script for viewing entries from a legally purchased copy of the Oxford English Dictionary CD-ROM.

Put oed.py and oeda.py into the root directory of the dictionary and run the command:

./oed.py [entry]

Where [entry] is the search query. For multiple search results the desired entry can be selected from a list.

Dictionary entries are contained in Zlib-compressed blocks (1066 total) in the 196MB file oed.t. The Zlib magic (78 DA) at the start of each block has been overwritten with a random 16-bit value. Blocks are located at fixed offsets defined as integer constants in the Neko bytecode file app.n. These were discovered in a bytecode dump of app.n using the Neko Compiler nekoc and copied to oeda.py.

Entites, HTML-based representations of non-ASCII symbols, are defined in the script file EntityMapper.as compiled into the Flash executable OED.swf. The script file was extracted from the Flash executable using the JPEXS Free Flash Decompiler and the entities copied to oeda.py.