OS X: Quick Pop-Up Dictionary

Contributor Icon Contributed by davak Date Icon October 27, 2008  
Tag Icon Tagged: Mac OS X Leopard

OS X now contains a very helpful, pop-up dictionary. It works in textedit, safari, and terminal.

My spelling is horrible. After reading a few of my tutorials, you are probably laughing at my vocabulary as well. Apple is trying to help poor souls like me.

Highlight a word in OS X and press ctrl-cmd-D. If you are in a supported application, a dictionary will appear under the word. My own testing shows that this works in Safari, textedit, and terminal. Yes, terminal.

popup dictionary for os x

I do not understand why Apple did not include this helpful feature in mail and calendar. Maybe that’ll be added in the Snow Leopard version.

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  • Michael Kloss
    This also works on Mail, but slidely different: You can use this not for the highlighted word, but for the word under your cursor.

    I also tried this successfully in Textmate, Pages, Keynote...
  • Awesome! Thanks!
  • cliff
    Nice shortcut. Works in Tiger.
  • Duncan
    This doesn't work for me. That keyshort does nothing.
  • Duncan
    But if I right click I do get the dictionary option - but it opens up the program itself rather than showing a pop-up with the info.
  • kenny Marks
    click the word first.
  • Edwin
    does this work for the iphone?? I would like a handheld that I can use to browse the seb with, and in japanese...something like firefox and rikaichan(a pop up dictionary for mozilla)

    any ideas??
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