Built-in Thesaurus

[guzhogi]

Something I'd really like to see Apple put into Mac OS X is a built-in thesaurus. It would work the same way as the built-in spell check: right click (or control click) a word and it gives you a list of synonyms. Sure, we have dictionary, but we have to get out of the program we're using, open dictionary & type in the word. Why not just do it like the spell check?

 

[WildCowboy]

In Safari, you can just hit control-command-D while hovering over the word in question to bring up the dictionary entry. A quick mouse click switches over to the thesaurus.

 

[IJ Reilly]

In Safari, you can just hit control-command-D while hovering over the word in question to bring up the dictionary entry. A quick mouse click switches over to the thesaurus.

This works in any Cocoa application -- Safari, TextEdit, Mail, Pages... one of the coolest features of OSX Tiger that hardly anyone seems to know about. And of course there's always the freestanding dictionary/thesaurus application. It's included boys and girls -- use it!

 

[Verto]

In Safari, you can just hit control-command-D while hovering over the word in question to bring up the dictionary entry. A quick mouse click switches over to the thesaurus.

Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? I've selected it to open the panel, but for some reason it won't bring up anything when I try it.

 

[WildCowboy]

Is there any reason why this wouldn't work? I've selected it to open the panel, but for some reason it won't bring up anything when I try it.

I don't know...it actually crashes Safari for me once in a while. Haven't figured out what triggers it those times...

 

[netdog]

This works in any Cocoa application -- Safari, TextEdit, Mail, Pages... one of the coolest features of OSX Tiger that hardly anyone seems to know about. And of course there's always the freestanding dictionary/thesaurus application. It's included boys and girls -- use it!

What a nifty trick IJ. Do you know of any pages that detail these kinds of benefits and tricks with Cocoa apps? I was totally unaware of this one, and if there are a lot of things like this, I may just switch over to Mail and Pages.