Saturday, November 20, 2010

The Google Dictionary (and Wordnik too)

I'm constantly amazed at what one can find while poking around Google's apparently inexhaustible resources.

For example, although I use (and teach) the DEFINE: operator, I never knew about dictionary.Google.com!


And over on Footle blog I found a couple of nice bookmarklets that give you instant access to the Dictionary.  Here's the one for English:

 gDefine

Just drag that link into your bookmarks toolbar to make it runnable.  (Go ahead and try it. If you don't like it, just right-click on the button and hit CUT.  That'll remove it from your bookmarks.)

To use, just highlight a word (try it here:  install, then highlight this word--lassitude--and then click on the gDefine bookmarklet).  Nice.

Here are a few other examples to get started.  Again, just drag these into the toolbar up above and you'll have this cross-language look-up / define ability.


gDefine (Spanish)


gDefine (German)

And bookmarklets for autotranslation from a selected term into your preferred language:

gTranslate (French->English)


And I would be remiss if I didn't also point out that you can also get this a very similar kind of information from  Wordnik. It doesn't do cross-language translation, but does give you another point of reference

Wordnik


-- Just as above, you can drag this link to your bookmarks bar, select a word or phrase on the page, and click. There's a cool extra feature...  just clicking on the bookmarklet without highlighting a word gives you a random word in Worknik (which is very entertaining for logophiles).

In my practice, I have them both in my bookmarks bar, and switch back and forth to see both sources (most recently used on "cardiomyopathy" and "efficacious" -- even though I know what both those words mean, it's interesting to see the differences in definition and use between Google and Wordnik).


Dictionary on!

2 comments:

  1. If you use Google Dictionary to look up words on webpages a lot, you should install this Chrome extension:
    https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja
    It's even easier than a bookmarklet! It also searches other sources, like Wikipedia and wordnet, when the word is not in Google Dictionary. I use it all the time.

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  2. Its awesome, now it is so easy to find Definitions and meanings with out any plugins. I find google's answers are more easy to understand. Thanks :-)

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