OS X: Quick Pop-Up Dictionary
Contributed by David Kirk 
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.
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 said on October 27, 2008
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…
davak said on October 28, 2008
Awesome! Thanks!
cliff said on October 29, 2008
Nice shortcut. Works in Tiger.
Duncan said on October 29, 2008
This doesn’t work for me. That keyshort does nothing.
Duncan said on October 29, 2008
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.
Edwin said on July 4, 2009
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??
kenny Marks said on July 9, 2009
click the word first.