I’m sure you often find yourself in a situation where you’re reading an article, and then come across a word that you want to lookup. Maybe you jump over to Wikipedia or an online dictionary to get a definition, but the LookItUp2 Greasemonkey script can save you a lot of time.
The screenshot above sums up everything that the script is capable of doing. When you highlight a word on the page just press Ctrl+Shift+Space to activate LookItUp2. Along the right side of the window you’ll be shown the Wikipedia page by default, but you can click on any of the tabs to navigate between other services. They include Google Images, Google, Urban Dictionary, Answers.com, Merriam-Webster, Wictionary, and more.
If you click on the drop-down menu you can see a full list of the services that are supported, and they are listed in order as they appear in the tabs. Using a single letter for each of the tabs may not always help identify which service is associated with a tab, but they do serve a dual purpose. If, for example, you highlight a word on the page and press the “w” key on the keyboard it will bring up the Wikipedia result for that word. Similarly highlighting a word and pressing “m” will bring up results from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. So the single-letter tabs also double as keyboard shortcuts. What’s awesome is that this only works if you have a word highlighted on the page, which means it plays nice with Firefox’s find-as-you-type feature.
If you’ve been looking for a way to lookup words and definitions faster this simple Greasemonkey script can definitely do the deed.
Try “qtl” extension for Firefox. You just have to select a word and the meaning appears in one of the 29 languages that are available. This means not only it’ll show the definition, it’ll translate the word when needed.
The focus of this isn’t to translate words though. It’s to provide definitions, Wikipedia lookups, image searches, and more. From the looks of it that extension is more limited than this is.
Hmm.. while it isn’t free, I far prefer Babylon over this. Works in all programs, not just Firefox, and looks much better and usable than this. I suppose this one is nice if you don’t need a better experience and want it for free though