Premshree's (品速力) Personal Weblog

Greasemonkey Dict

: premshree; July 21st, 2005

Current Music:: AC/DC - Back In Black

It’s quite common to lookup dictionaries for words on web pages. I wrote a Greasemonkey script to make life a tad easier for me:

Now I don’t know if there’s such a script already. Anyway, doesn’t matter now. I’m using OneLook to fetch the definition. I know it’s probably not the best thing to do, however, I don’t know of any dictionary services that provide an API. Know any?

Well, I could set one up locally, but that’d work for me only. Oh well. Laters.

Oh yeah, using it: just double click on the word that you want to know the meaning of... if it does mean anything, a ncie box will appear, nothing happens otherwise.

Script’s here. That’s it for now from Monkeyland!

Tags: code, dictionary, greasemonkey, hacks, tech

( 28 comments — Leave a comment )

yathin

2005-07-21 07:26 am (UTC)

Interesting. You could at least setup one for all of us at Y! atleast... ;)

beerbal

2005-07-21 07:54 am (UTC)

I use WordWeb for the same purpose. See if they have an interface for programs - they might.

manubhardwaj

2005-07-21 07:41 am (UTC)

Dude, this absolutely rocks! I was just reading Swaroop's recent entry and was feeling very jealous about Firefox not having the same capability, and ... voila! Here it is!

*Bows*

premshree

2005-07-21 12:35 pm (UTC)

I was jealous too, and terribly bored at the same time.

manubhardwaj

2005-07-21 07:44 am (UTC)

One suggestion Icould give is that, instead of having a blue-on-grey X button to close it (something that wasn't initially obvious), the popup can be made to close automatically as soon as the mouse stops hovering above the definition?

Just a thought.

premshree

2005-07-21 12:37 pm (UTC)

It’s not a blue-on-grey button, actually. It takes the color of whatever style A would have on that page.

I thought about that closing thing. Maybe I should do it. Lesse.

eddd

2005-07-21 08:15 am (UTC)

I use Babylon.

premshree

2005-07-21 12:39 pm (UTC)

I use FreeBSD.

shruthi_dipali

2005-07-21 08:59 am (UTC)

nice..

freegeek

2005-07-21 09:31 am (UTC)

dict.org ?

ga_woo

2005-07-21 12:25 pm (UTC)

They also have a DICT server running. One doesn't even have to screen-scrape. Wouldn't work from behind my office firewall though.

Best option would be setting up a server within the company.

noorul

2005-07-21 10:37 am (UTC)

nice one :-)

moccacino

2005-07-21 10:50 am (UTC)

Why not use Wordweb instead? Ctrl+Alt+W and you have the meaning, antonym, nearest, types, etc.

bluesmoon

2005-07-21 11:06 am (UTC)

Wordweb is a desktop application isn't it? Last time I checked it didn't run on linux or freebsd.

moccacino

2005-07-21 11:10 am (UTC)

Yes, I just checked - it doesn't run on Linux, but they are looking at one in the near future.

bluesmoon

2005-07-21 11:24 am (UTC)

IAC, a desktop app doesn't help unless everyone in the world installs it. That's not possible because they can't support every platform in the world (like premshree's phone for example). That's why the web is such a universal platform.

moccacino

2005-07-21 11:37 am (UTC)

Understood.

I didn't take Premshree's post in the win/linux/global sense. For personal use, I find wordweb way easier than other web-based dictionaries.

bluesmoon

2005-07-21 11:43 am (UTC)

Word web was a big part of my college projects back in the day.

premshree

2005-07-21 12:33 pm (UTC)

It was a part of my GRE preparation days.

petropeter

2005-07-21 06:26 pm (UTC)

How to use this script ??

premshree

2005-07-22 04:05 am (UTC)

You’ll need Greasemonkey. The script won’t work with the versions available for download, though. And it is recommended that you don’t install the earlier versions because of a security issue.

teemus

2005-07-21 07:15 pm (UTC)

Fuckin' awesome!

vinodpillai

2005-07-21 08:47 pm (UTC)

Really makes life a lot easier.

coreid

2005-07-22 03:02 am (UTC)

Very useful, thanks :)

(Anonymous)

2005-08-19 09:57 pm (UTC)

Nifty piece of work this, thanks. It works now with the 0.5 beta release, I had modified the script earlier to pop up a new window to get around, when GM_xmlhttpRequest was disabled for a while.
-Rohit

spellcheck made simple

shantanuo

2005-09-11 07:28 am (UTC)

Here are the other options available.

1) Dictionary Tooltip is better since it does not require greasemonkey.
http://tinyurl.com/dh9sn

2) Clusty Toolbar looks promising too!
http://clusty.com/toolbar

3) ConQuery: context sensitive webquery extension
http://conquery.mozdev.org/screenshots.html

4) And the last but not the least, you can use YubNub a (social) command line for the web.
http://yubnub.org
Install the plugin...
http://tinyurl.com/amwt9

I still prefer wordweb since it works in any application. (or is it "that old habits die hard"). It is the only software I recommend that is worth downloading.

Re: spellcheck made simple

premshree

2005-09-11 07:37 am (UTC)

I just wanted something that would need no effort, so I wrote that script.

greasemonkey dict

(Anonymous)

2005-11-03 03:38 am (UTC)

oh my goodness! this script is wonderful.

Don't listen to the naysayers on the other posts who are whining about all the other things you should try. This is the one to keep.

Good job.

( 28 comments — Leave a comment )