Episode Details

HeliBoard ships with zero dictionaries — you download a .dict file yourself, and that file may date to October 2014. This episode digs into the open-source dictionary stack: ESDB/SCOWL for English, Hunspell across Europe, and the AOSP dictionaries repo aggregating both for Android, each maintained by different people on different schedules. We contrast that with Gboard's federated analytics, which discovers new words on-device through character-level votes without ever seeing what you typed, and trace how a word like "doomscrolling" took until 2026 to reach the open-source English dictionary. Then we get practical: curating a personal dictionary and carrying it across operating systems without rebuilding it from scratch every time. Episode #293774 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/293774