Linux console online dictionary lookup

I often need to lookup words in various online dictionaries, but in many cases I would prefer to get the results right in the console, instead of having to launch the browser, type in the URL and wait for the page to load.

For example, here is a bash oneliner that translates an English word to Spanish right in the console:

Wordreference English-Spanish: 

curl -j -s -A "Opera/9.60 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.2.13337/458; U; en) Presto/2.2.0" "http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=`echo $* | sed 's/ /%20/g'`" | html2text -utf8 | less -R

Wordreference Spanish to English:

curl -j -s -A "Opera/9.60 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.2.13337/458; U; en) Presto/2.2.0" "http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=`echo $* | sed 's/ /%20/g'`" | html2text -utf8 | less -R

Merriam Webster Online English Dictionary: 

curl -j -s -A "Opera/9.60 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.2.13337/458; U; en) Presto/2.2.0" "http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/`echo $* | sed 's/ /%20/g'`" | html2text -utf8 | less -R

Wikipedia (EN):

curl -j -s -A "Opera/9.60 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.2.13337/458; U; en) Presto/2.2.0" "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/`echo $* | sed 's/ /%20/g'`" | html2text -utf8 | less -R 

Usage: Save the required script to a file, make it executable (chmod +x webster), and then type the script name from the console with the word(s) you need translated as arguments.

Instead of creating a separate script for each dictionary it might be more practical to add the scriptlets as aliases in your .bashrc file, e.g:

alias webster="curl -j -s -A "Opera/9.60 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.2.13337/458; U; en) Presto/2.2.0" "http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/`echo $* | sed 's/ /%20/g'`" | html2text -utf8 | less -R"

Make sure you have curl, html2text , sed, and less installed.

A similar result can be achieved by using some console browser like lynx or w3m.

Install w3m:

sudo apt-get install w3m # for Ubuntu
sudo pacman -S w3m       # Archlinux

Create a wrapper script which includes the URL:

echo 'w3m "http://www.wordreference.com/es/translation.asp?tranword=$*"' > ~/bin/en2es
chmod +x ~/bin/en2es

Now the script can be run like this:

en2es word of mouth

The advantage in this case is that you can use all the standard browser features, like clicking links, etc.