What’s the word Tiger

Submitted by Tigerstorm on Wed, 2005-05-04 03:27.

Mac OS X

Dictionary

The thing about dictionaries is that they are great, but you never have one next to you when you need it the most. They are heavy so you can’t really carry them along with you all the time, they take up lots of space on your desk and you might end up cutting yourself while going through all pages in a hurry.

And there's one more thing more about them and that is that they're not like Spotlight, almost the contrary.. Find it but find it slow.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a Oxford dictionary in your Apple computer?
It weighs nothing, doesn’t take up any space on your desk. You don’t need to be a book nerd that never leaves the library. A dictionary for the rest of us!

Dictionary

One of the more smaller news in Tiger compared to Spotlight and Dashboard is a Oxford dictionary including thesaurus (American-English) as an application. You can access this dictionary by Programs and double-click on Dictionary icon, but that's not there when you need it, while surfing in Safari perhaps.

There is a better way I’m gonna tell you about.. First of all this tool only works with Cocoa apps in OS X , so programs like Safari is supported. And this is where I think this tool is gonna be used a lot. For example, you're browsing creativebits and Ivan has written a word that you can’t really understand or want to find out more what the word actually meant.

How-to:

Find a difficult word and mark it

Press Cmd-Ctrl-D and a little window open with the meaning of the word using the dictionary but in a more handy version, now you can rollover the words and in realtime find out what they mean..

Simple, fast and genius.

Tigerstorm's blog
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Wow...

Submitted by ids* (not verified) on Wed, 2005-05-04 03:58.

I didnt notice the cmd+ctrl+d thing before, that is fantastic. i love my cute fuzzy little tiger... and all of its stuff not under the spotlight. like the dictionary, and grapher.

I love the dictionary

Submitted by Charles (not verified) on Wed, 2005-05-04 04:18.

The dictionary is a wonderful little gadget, I discovered it through the review on Ars Technica, where he points out the one huge GUI flaw: the dictionary, when activated by ctrl-cmd-D, searches the word under the mouse cursor, not the word next to the text input cursor. It would be a lot handier if you could just activate the dictionary as you were typing along, searching the word behind the text cursor. But under the current interface, you MUST stop typing and move the mouse cursor to do the job. When I'm using a text editor, I usually push the mouse out of the way and stop using it completely.

Scripting the dictionary

Submitted by TjL (not verified) on Mon, 2005-05-16 18:19.

DaringFireball has a way around the "must highlight" limitation

http://daringfireball.net/2005/05/dictionary_bbedit

Nice

Submitted by mrbuhyah on Wed, 2005-05-04 04:55.

I had seen that before in a screen shot. Wondered how to do it.

Thanks!

Ron Gallagher
Citrus Studios

Or …

Submitted by nednieuws (not verified) on Wed, 2005-05-04 06:45.

Press Ctrl+Cmd+D and hover over any word in any Cocoa application. You can release the D and move the pointer from word to word.

in reply to:

Submitted by Ivan on Wed, 2005-05-04 07:07.

"...you're browsing creativebits and Ivan has written a word that you can’t really understand..."

LOL. That word might not be in the Oxford Dictionary. Maybe it's just me thinking such English word exist. :)

Thanks for the tip! I'm installing Tiger within two days, can't wait to try it out.

MY GOD! THIS IS F***ING

Submitted by larusson on Wed, 2005-05-04 11:22.

MY GOD! THIS IS F***ING GENIUS!!!
Not joking... this is great!! :D

Firefox and dictionaries (and more)

Submitted by secretrobot on Wed, 2005-05-04 23:47.

Not exactly an OS-level tip, but I use Firefox for my dictionary needs. You can easily set up quick searches for dictionary sites, the Wikipedia, eBay, Google, etc.

So, whenever I have a browser window open (99% of the time), I can type my keyword into the location bar followed by my search term to quickly get a search result. I can hit Cmdr(Ctrl)+T and do it in a new tab as well so that I don't interfere with my current browsing. Here are some of the quick search keywords I use:

lu (look up) for dictionary.com
slang for urbandictionary.com
wp for wikipedia
image for google image search
news for google news search
NIV to look something up in the Bible (New International Version)

So by typing "lu sesquipedalian" I was able to see that, in fact, I AM a sesquipedalian. ;o)