If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time on a handful of word-related sites. I’ve built some bookmarklets for my most frequent look-ups, and you may find them helpful too. They work in Firefox on Mac and Windows, and I haven’t tried them in any other browsers or systems (sorry). There are two ways to use each one:
- Loading the bookmarklet will prompt you for a word or phrase to lookup; type it in the box and click OK.
- Highlight a word or phrase on any web page, then load the bookmarklet to skip the prompt and look it up immediately.
Let me know if you have trouble with any of these. Right-click any of the links below and select “Bookmark this link” to add it to your bookmarks menu.
(Note that this Wordie bookmarklet is a modified version of angharad’s original, designed to function the same way as the others listed here. It also recognizes null values and doesn’t try to add them.)
And now, the pièce de résistance of this post, Visuwords.
I just discovered this site and I was flat dazzled. You can look up any word to find definitions, synonyms, antonyms, acronym meanings, and possibly more that I have yet to find. I like the snazzy interface, which effectively shows the associations between each item. The site seems to understand concepts too, and links words to other related things. Fun to play around with, and possibly a valuable time-saver when those bookmarklets just don’t do it for you. It’s also darn quick. Possible inspiration for your next case of writer’s block?
Click the picture above to hop on over, and don’t say I never gave you nothing.
(Originally posted by uselessness)
Thank you, it’s a great list of tools!
I think, I’ll use them soon in different cases. By the way, as for languages, I prefer to use english thesaurus in my professional activity.