nisus.com

I have made of the Dictionary.app a custom dictionary which is, I must say, very useful. It now contains the Oxford dictionary and Thesaurus, Wikipedia, New Oxford American Dictionary and Writer's Thesaurus, Apple dictionary, Dictionnaire de l'Académie française and Littré, an Italian dictionary, a German dictionary.
One can select a Search for either of these dictionaries or for all of them, it's really useful.
This might not seem a great deal to you-who-write-exclusively-in English (the provided Thesaurus is very very good), but for me, who write mostly in French, very often in English, and often enough in italian and German, it's smashing.
Accidentally, as I was writing in Nisus, my finger slipped, I don't know where, and quite suddenly I got all kinds of definitions and translations for a certain word, it was impressive!
Since then I have tried and tried to reproduce this and haven't been able to do so. I don't know how that word selected itself, and how it produced the dictionary.
Does anybody know? I am sure I am missing something elementary, and probably many of you do know.

In Cocoa apps, including NWP, you can invoke the dictionaries by selecting a word and pressing Command-Control-d or by selecting a word and then right-clicking and applying Look Up "[the selected word]" from the contextual menu.

Elementary, my dear Hamid! Elementary! Thank you very much. I was looking for an accidental combination of commands (and I am pretty sure I could not have produced accidentally “command-control-d”), but what I did do accidentally was clicking a word with the right side of the mouse. I tried, and the dictionary came with both methods. Many thanks!
Cheers.

If you're on 10.8, you can also look up a word by putting your cursor over it and doing a three-finger-tap ... mind you, I don't remember if you have to set that up specifically in the appropriate system preferences.

Mark

xiamenese wrote:I I don't remember if you have to set that up specifically in the appropriate system preferences.

Mark

I suppose one should twiddle something or other for your method to work, for I tried it, and the result was that I went from highlighted word to highlighted sentence, as is usual with the Mac. The click on the right of the mouse is the best, I've been using it all afternoon.
Thanks, anyway.

Hi -

works even within this Forum - put the cursor over Anne & click the trackpad with 3 fingers simultaneously…

HE

Anne,
What I'm wondering is how you made the custom dictionary with all that data for dictionary.app? Maybe I could do something similar with other languages. Thanks!

And now thanks to this discussion I opened Dictionary.app and see that there is a preference to show the pronunciation in IPA! Great! Thanks Anne, everybody.

NisusUser wrote:Anne,
What I'm wondering is how you made the custom dictionary with all that data for dictionary.app? Maybe I could do something similar with other languages. Thanks!

I think you may be misinterpreting what Anne meant to say. I think she only meant that Dictionary.app is an app that comes with all those dictionaries loaded. I wonder where the dictionaries come from and what determines the selection? Here in Japan I end up with a Japanese-English dictionary, and optional choices of historical Japanese and Japanese synonyms, but no German or French.

You can download German-English dictionary:
http://lipflip.org/articles/dictcc-dictionary-plugin

German Thesaurus:
http://www.heise.de/download/dwl52569

Direct download link for Littré:
http://www.19pouces.net/files/Downloads/Littre.dmg

Dictionaries reside in the Dictionaries folder in your home directory for single user (or Macintosh HD/Library/Dictionaries for all users).
They all work with Apple's Dictionary app.

Anne Cuneo wrote:

xiamenese wrote:I I don't remember if you have to set that up specifically in the appropriate system preferences.

Mark

I suppose one should twiddle something or other for your method to work, for I tried it, and the result was that I went from highlighted word to highlighted sentence, as is usual with the Mac. The click on the right of the mouse is the best, I've been using it all afternoon.
Thanks, anyway.

The three-finger tap for dictionary lookup is controlled by System Preferences>Trackpad>Point & Click>Lookup checkbox. It only works with Cocoa apps and you need to three-finger *tap* the trackpad *not* three-finger *click* it (or as you appear to be doing *triple-clicking* it). And finally you need to be running at least OS X 10.7 (or even 10.8?) on a fairly recent MacBook, or a desktop Mac with the bluetooth Magic Trackpad, for these "Point & Click" gestures.