Connection timeout for the dictionary server at 'dict.org:2628'

Anyone else having difficulty connecting to dict servers? I don't seem
to be able to get a response out of the ones I've tried since yesterday.
They're pingable, but no definitions of any kind can be squeezed out of
them. I should probably get me a dead-tree version of an English
dictionary, now that I think of it, but it's really practical to look
words up in an xterm (I guess by practical I mean fast. Of course, when
it just sits there doing nothing, that ain't very fast. The timeout
seems exceedingly long; it's probably only a minute, but a minute's an
eternity in the electron age, isn't it?).

I suppose somebody's going to say I should run my own private server on
localhost. Is that what everybody does who isn't mentally abbreviated?
.