Ovidhan

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  The word entries which is a scrollable list of all the 50k words

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  A details page

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  Accent Color Options

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  Dark Mode

Inspiration

I love reading Bengali literature. But every time I stumbled upon an unfamiliar word, looking it up was painfully slow. Open a browser, wait for the page to load, get distracted by ads, close three popups — just to find the meaning of one word. It broke my reading flow every single time. After doing this one too many times the solution became obvious — build an app that gives instant, offline access to a proper Bangla dictionary. Ovidhan is that solution.

What it does

Ovidhan is a free, offline-first, open-source Bangla dictionary app built with Flutter. It carries 50,000+ words from the Adhunik Bangla Ovidhan — a dictionary certified by the Bangla Academy — giving users pure Bangla definitions, not just Bangla to English translations. It works instantly with zero internet, zero ads, and zero distractions. Even on low-end devices.

How we built it

The dictionary data comes from Project-Shobdo by Inan-XR, a publicly available OCR dataset of the Bangla Academy dictionary. The app is built with Flutter and Dart, using Isar for the offline database, Provider for state management, and SharedPreferences for user preferences. I had the help of AI throughout the process — but every single line of code was written by my own hands. The AI helped me understand and debug. The building was mine.

Challenges we ran into

I had never built a Flutter app before. Every concept — widgets, state management, navigation, databases — was learned on the fly as the app demanded it. Integrating a 50,000+ word offline database efficiently without janking low-end devices was a real challenge. Getting the Bangla text to render beautifully across different devices required careful font handling with Noto Sans Bengali.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Shipping a fully functional, polished app while learning Flutter from scratch is something I am genuinely proud of. The app is completely offline, ad-free, and open-source — which feels rare in this space. Most importantly it actually solves the problem it was built for. My reading flow has never been smoother.

What we learned

The best projects are born from genuine personal frustration. I was not trying to build something impressive — I was trying to solve my own problem. That focus kept me going when things got difficult. I also learned that Flutter is remarkably powerful for someone starting from scratch, and that the Bangla language deserves far better digital tooling than what currently exists.

What's next for Ovidhan

Favorites and Word of the Day are already in progress. Voice search, word sharing, and cross-device sync are on the roadmap. The dictionary data itself also needs updating and cleaning — that is our next major technical priority. Ovidhan started as a personal tool. The goal now is to make it the definitive Bangla dictionary for everyone.

Built With

• dart
• flutter
• isar