There RFC 2229 defines the The Dictionary Server Protocol (DICT) is a TCP transaction based query/response protocol that allows a client to access dictionary definitions from a set of natural language dictionary databases.

The most common play with the DICT , that most people are aware is :

curl -s dict://dict.org/d:word


Exploring this a more , and using few quick cli utilities i tried the below.

But with the most common method as mentioned above the negative aspect is reflected when we have a huge list of words for which you are in need of it's meanings.

Assume that the list of words are in a file called "list" and the end of the trick you will have the meanings ins a file called "meanings"

1. With "dict" utility , if on debian just do an apt-get install dict, then:

cat list | xargs -n1 dict >> meanings


2. Using a simple Bash script :

while read word;
do curl dict://dict.org/d:$word >> meanings
done < list


3.With sed and curl :

sed 's#^#dict://dict.org/d:#' list | xargs -d $'\n' curl > meanings


I hope "can't" isn't in your word list.Using xargs there means you DO have a loop, you just can't see it. Also, it's got broken parsing.If there's a "'"[apostrophe] in one of the words, it'll fail.
Solution :

sed 's#^#dict://dict.org/d:#' list | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 curl > meanings


It's a bit ugly imo, but it replaces all \ns with \0s, since \0 is the only delimiter where xargs will not treat "'" [apostrophe] specially.

You may wonder what does the #^# and # signify in sed ?
sed users are familiar with sed substitutions:
s/pattern/replacement/ whichever character is after the s will be used as the separator. It doesn't have to be /
since the replacement contained /, it's easier to use a different separator rather than escape each / dict:\/\/ [Ugly escape].