Rated 4 out of 5 stars

by LukeCro on Sept. 1, 2008 · permalink

An excellent Firefox extension for Mac OS X users -- "Look Up in Dictionary" creates fast and nearly seamless integration between Firefox and the Apple Dictionary App that's built into OS X. Although in some ways it's not quite as robust or universal as, say, David Costanzo's "Dict" Firefox Add-On or the (very powerful but Windows-only) program WordWeb, it's still an essential Firefox extension for modern Mac OSX users, since it offers such clean and fast integration with the operating system's own dictionary/thesaurus app.

Wish-list for future releases: An easy to remember keyboard shortcut (WordWeb's Ctrl-Alt-W and/or Apple's Ctrl-Cmd-D); and the ability to look up words from text-boxes, forms, and search-boxes.

Perhaps David Costanzo's "Dict" Firefox Add-On -- or apsects of its code -- could one day be merged with Macaw's Look Up in Dictionary Firefox Add-On . . . Unlike "Look Up" 0.2, "Dict" allows users to look up words from text-boxes within the browser -- but, on the other hand, "Dict" doesn't allow the user to choose the Apple OS X Dictionary.app program as a look-up engine, and instead relies on Javascript and online dictionary servers (which aren't always reliable). A best-of-both-worlds add-on would likely allow users the flexibility of using internal (app/software)and external (online) dictionaries as look-up options, providing fast and reliable Dictionary.app integration along with text-box Look Up options, hotkey lookup, etc.