Building Indic dictionaries: From Go to Rust

October 2025 was the 15th anniversary of Olam, the open-source, open-data Malayalam dictionary that I maintain. There have been multiple Indic dictionaries that have followed Olam -- Alar (Kannada), Samam (all four South Indian languages) and others. In the process of maintaining Indic dictionaries, I built dictpress as a dictionary publishing and management tool that allows anyone to publish dictionaries for any language. Originally written in Go (with Postgres database), I recently rewrote it in Rust, incorporating several years of technical (and social) lessons in running open dictionary projects at scale. In this talk, I give an overview of the Indic open data dictionary projects in general, and a walkthrough of the technical background, from the tooling to the language processing algorithms that had to be invented, to make a great dictionary user experience possible.