Select a word. See what it means. Keep reading.
Double-click a word in the window below. That is the whole gesture, and it is the same one the program watches for on your desktop.
The library's oldest catalogue is a lesson in obsolescence. Its compiler, a man of laconic habits, annotated each entry with a marginal gloss so ephemeral that later archivists mistook the notes for damage.
What survives is serendipity: a record of one reader's attention, preserved by accident rather than by intent.
Double-click any word above, or drag across one. Select two words and nothing happens, exactly as in the program.
WordMeaning sits in your system tray. Select a single word in any program and its definition appears at your cursor, then disappears after six seconds. It shows the part of speech, up to two meanings, and an example sentence when there is one. No pronunciation, no audio.
How it works
Three things happen. That is the whole program.
You select a word
Double-click a word, or drag across it, in any program that lets you select text: a browser, a PDF, Word, a chat window.
The definition appears
A small popup opens at your cursor with the word, its part of speech, its meaning, and an example sentence when the dictionary has a plain one. If the word isn't found, press Ctrl+Shift+D to search the web for it instead.
It gets out of the way
Click anywhere, switch windows, or wait six seconds. The popup closes on its own and leaves nothing behind.
What it doesn't do
You are about to run an unsigned program from someone you have never heard of, and it watches the text you select. Here is exactly what it does with it.
It doesn't write anything to disk
Words you look up are held in memory while the program is running and are gone when you close it. There is no history file, no log, and no database.
It doesn't keep your clipboard
Copying the word is how the lookup works, so whatever you had copied is saved first and put back immediately afterwards, including when a lookup fails.
It doesn't send anything but the single word
One request over HTTPS to one pinned host, freedictionaryapi.com; if that host has no entry for the word, one more to api.datamuse.com. No account, no identifier, no analytics, no telemetry. Your browser is only ever opened by you pressing Ctrl+Shift+D.
It doesn't read sentences
If your selection is longer than one word it is ignored and nothing is sent anywhere. The same applies to anything that isn't plain letters.
It doesn't hide its source
The whole program is about five hundred lines of AutoHotkey v2 on GitHub under the MIT licence. You can read every line before you run it.
Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognised app from starting.
Running this app might put your PC at risk.
App: WordMeaning-Setup.exe
Publisher: Unknown publisher
You will see this dialog on first launch. It is not a virus warning. Windows shows it for any program whose publisher hasn't paid for a code-signing certificate, which costs a few hundred dollars a year. This one hasn't.
- Click More info (the small link, circled).
- Click Run anyway, which appears underneath.
If that trade isn't one you want to make, read the source first. It is short, and the link is at the bottom of this page.
Built with AutoHotkey v2 in six small modules, with no dependencies and no build step beyond the compiler. Read it, fork it, or file an issue on GitHub.