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Dictionary Search

Changing/Adding the Dictionaries

It is possible to select another online dictionary or adding additional dictionaries by specifying these in the settings dialog. The settings dialog can be accessed in Firefox and Thunderbird by selecting Tools/Extensions from the main menu and then selecting the DictionarySearch extension and finally clicking on the small square with the checkmark (i.e. the top one of the three squares on the right). In the Mozilla Suite you have to go to Edit/Preferences and then select DictionarySearch. You the will see the following dialog:

For each dictionary you can specify the following items:

Text

This is the text of the menu item that will appear in the context menu. The text should contain a $ sign because the $ sign will be replaced by the word that has been selected. You can set it for example to:
Dictionary Search for "$"

If you leave this item empty, that specific dictionary will not be added to the context menu.

Access Key

The access key is the letter that is used for keyboard access and that will be underlined in the context menu. It should be a letter which is the menu text

URL

This is the URL for the online dictionary you want to use. The URL should contain a $ sign because the $ sign will be replaced by the word that has been selected. for example if you want to use thefreedictionary.com you set it to:

In the table below there are listed a number of dictionaries that you can use. If you see for example "English <-> Spanish" it means that the dictionary can translate from English to Spanish and from Spanish to English. The dictionary then automatically recognizes the language of the word you selected. If you see "English -> Spanish" it means that it can only translate from English to Spanish. I personally really like the default i.e. The Free Dictionary. It has nice features such as that you can click on every word in the explanation to look that word up again or the fact that you can also lookup the word up in an encyclopedia by simply clicking on the encyclopedia tab on the resulting page.

For the polyglots out there Tomer Cohen sent me the following 17 dictionaries for different languages of Babylon. The cool thing is that the babylon dictionaries automatically recognize the language of the word you selected and translates it to the language you selected. So if you select the "To Japanese" dictionary, you can go and read pages in all the other languages and with Dictionary Search you can translate words on all these pages to Japanese.

In principle all dictionaries or other search engines (such as Google), which use an URL (i.e. you can bookmark the search result) to send the word you entered to the server can be used by DictionarySearch.

Another nice multi-language dictionary Interglot. It supports English Spanish French German Dutch and Swedish. I leave it as an excercise to the reader to find the appropriate URLs for Dictionary Search for this dictionary