I want a user program that can query domain nameservers

[Web Dove]

Occasionally I want to contact a host that is not in our database.  If
I could talk to a nameserver near where I suspect the host to be I might
be able to learn its net number.  Unfortunately, the nameserver
(socket 53/tcp) does not have ascii interaction like SMTP, so I
couldn't interact with simply a terminal.  We do not have nameserver
code wired into out C library yet.

Does anyone out there have a standalone program for interacting with
the nameserver on a specific machine?