Mac Kindergarten

Do you remember those old days, when you had a dictionary and a thesaurus on your shelf, waiting for you to grab them and look up stuff. Then the internet came along and Wikipedia did all that away. Now correct writing as well as looking up meanings is a matter of using a search engine.

Don’t get me wrong, Wikipedia is great but there is a real dictionary that is at your hand, right there on your Mac. What about a quick look at a word? What about a quick substitution for that word, in order not to use it again in two straight sentences?

Meet Dictionary - Mac OS X’s dictionary application. It includes a thesaurus, a special Apple-related dictionary and it can even look up stuff on wikipedia (directly from the application itself - without the website).

Basic searching
To launch Dictionary, locate it in your Applications directory or use Butler’s abbreviation window.

It opens up and waits for you to type a word. Results will be displayed as you type.

Use the up- and down-arrow keys or the mouse to navigate the search results. Press the return/enter key or double-click any result to open its explanation.

Search in specific locations
Above the search results you see all available “books” to search in - Dictionary, Thesaurus, Apple and Wikipedia.

Click the one you want to search in. If you click Wikipedia you must be connected to the internet, since it performs a live search on Wikipedia’s website and returns the results to the dictionary application.

Browsing
As you move your mouse cursor over any word in the description, you see that the word gets underlined and the mouse cursor changes into a hand (exactly the same as you move over a link on an web page).

A word you click gets looked up (just as you would enter the word).

Use the back/forward button at the top, to navigate back and forth multiple search results (as on a web page).

Increasing font size
Use the button with the smaller A and bigger A (right to the back/forward buttons) to increase or decrease the font size. Click it several times to increase / decrease step-by-step.

Preferences
You can set up dictionary to fit your needs. To access the preferences, go to the application menu and select Preferences or press the shortcut command-, (comma).

In the preferences you can disable/enable certain dictionaries as well as fine tune them. You might want to change the pronunciation or enable multiple languages of the Wikipedia entries, so the articles of Wikipedia show up in your native language.

Contextual Menu
Dictionary is not a standalone application by any means. It’s tightly integrated into Mac OS X and you can access it from almost everywhere where you see (Safari, TextEdit, Mail, …)

Using the dictionary application inside an application is easy:

1. Highlight a word (best way is to double click it)
2. Control-click it to bring up the contextual menu
3. Select Look up in Dictionary

Back to the preferences: You can decide if that command either pops open the Dictionary application or displays dictionary panel only, looking like this:

In this panel, click the More… button open this word in the dictionary application. Click the arrow in the lower left corner (next to the word Dictionary) to pick a different source to find the word in.

More on integration in Mac OS X
In a previous post on the Services menu, we covered this very briefly.

Dictionary provides also a service so it can be used from every application, not featuring the “Look up in Dictionary” contextual menu item.

To access the Service to look up a word in Dictionary do this:

1. Highlight a word (best way is to double click it)
2. Click the application menu
3. Pick Services > Look up in Dictionary

One more thing…
In Dictionary, open the Go menu and pick Front/Back Matter.

It contains a lot of useful things for reference (Language Guide to English, History, Clichés, Chemical Elements, conversion tables, etc.).

Explore it by yourself and be happy with your new Dictionary.

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Tags: Dictionary, Services

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 7:51 pm and is filed under Utilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.