A definitive no is the answer. This complexity is necessary only if others care about your shared state aka vocabulary, and, multiple write ops are being done on same records at the same relative time on different devices. For example, a document editor could use CRDTs without looking silly. A CRDT is an eventually consistent distributed object but all its complexity is there to handle concurrent modifications.
In your application, the consistency requirements are pretty weak and easy to meet with a basic client/server architecture with a well defined sync point set on its life-cycle. For example, sync on boot, sync on net-reconnect, etc. Or, you could use a simple P2P protocol so on boot you discover your other connected devices and your apps can shake hand and exchange notes to sync up as they modify their local state: “Hey gang, + “KISS”. “Keep it simple ..”. Use json if you must.
Further simple characteristics of this app is that the state ops on your dictionary are commutative (like a CRDT!). On one device you add word “Foo” and on the other you add “Bar”. You do not care (do you?) that you added them in a certain order, so you don’t even have to bother with what is rather difficult to do in a performant manner: maintain a total ordering over the state of the system. (Think sharded ordered-sets..)
There's a few edge cases that you'd probably need to handle (like adding the same word with two different definitions), but probably few enough that you could do them ad-hoc and punt to the user. ("Hey, merging these two sets failed, here's the conflict, which do you want to keep?")
Something fancy like Operational Transforms or CRDT might make your life easier if you find a library that's ergonomic for your use case, but it's definitely not necessary.
In your application, the consistency requirements are pretty weak and easy to meet with a basic client/server architecture with a well defined sync point set on its life-cycle. For example, sync on boot, sync on net-reconnect, etc. Or, you could use a simple P2P protocol so on boot you discover your other connected devices and your apps can shake hand and exchange notes to sync up as they modify their local state: “Hey gang, + “KISS”. “Keep it simple ..”. Use json if you must.
Further simple characteristics of this app is that the state ops on your dictionary are commutative (like a CRDT!). On one device you add word “Foo” and on the other you add “Bar”. You do not care (do you?) that you added them in a certain order, so you don’t even have to bother with what is rather difficult to do in a performant manner: maintain a total ordering over the state of the system. (Think sharded ordered-sets..)