Scraping thefreedictionary.com This scrapes results from thefreedictionary.com:

#!/usr/bin/python

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs
import re
from requests import get


def remove_non_ascii(text):
    return re.sub(r'[^\x00-\x7F]+', '', text)


def get_soup(url):
    raw = remove_non_ascii(get(url).content)
    soup = bs(raw)
    return soup.select("#MainTxt")[0].select('.ds-single')[0].text.strip()


def lookup(word):
    base_url = "http://www.thefreedictionary.com/"
    query_url = (base_url + word)
    return get_soup(query_url)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print lookup('linux')


Example



Warning: this script may fail to comply with thefreedictionary.com's TOS
According to PEP8, import re should come first
In free dictionary there is only one div having the class ds-single. You can simplify your code to search for this div
This doesn't apply to your program, but if you want to scrape multiple pages, it's better to use grequests.