WordWeb Pro is a desktop English thesaurus and dictionary that integrates into nearly every software on a computer system. The program runs in offline mode by default, but can connect to the Internet to provide additional information when an Internet connection is available.

You can bring up the main application interface to look up words or phrases right away, or use the the program’s hotkey (Ctrl and right-clicking after selecting a word or Ctrl-Alt-W) to send that word to the program interface. If you use the keyboard shortcut you also get options to replace the selected word or phrase in the browser with an alternative. The integration was tested successfully in the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email client and Microsoft Word. It is likely that it will work in the majority of Windows programs as well.

And since it uses its own word databases that are available on the computer, results are almost displayed instantly.

WordWeb Pro displays the spelling and meanings of the word or phrase (separated into nouns, verbs and derived where appropriate). The nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs buttons on the right can be used to quickly jump between those groups in the interface.

The lower half of the screen displays word related information that may include synonyms, words that are similar, types or antonyms. The word interface for instance displays type of (e.g. computer programme, surface) and Types (CLI, GUI) when the word is looked up in WordWeb.

A double-click on any word listed in the interface looks up that word immediately in the program. You can use the back and forward buttons or the history pulldown menu to quickly open up a word again that you have already looked up.

Words, phrases or the entire text can be copied directly when they are displayed in the definition part of the interface, or copied using the copy button when they are displayed in the lower part.

Plus and minus buttons are sometimes displayed in the interface to display additional or less alternatives.

WordWeb Pro comes with an audio module that offers to pronounce the current word or phrase to the user. It is still an interesting feature, especially so for non-native speakers who have troubles pronouncing particular words.

When you connect the program to the Internet you extend its functionality to include information from Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wordweb Online in the program interface. A click on one of the tabs opens the word’s page on Wikipedia or Wiktionary directly in the program interface. This may be handy if additional information about a word or phrase are needed that the program cannot supply.

A bookmarking system is available to quickly jump to a word or phrase look up in the program.

The professional version of WordWeb comes with features that that free version does not offer. This includes 65,000 additional audio pronunciations (compared to 5000 of the free version), 5000 additional definitions, the ability to add custom web references and glossaries, integration of third party dictionaries, wildcard searches, full text definition search and the ability to find and solve anagrams.

Options

It is possible to change the hotkeys to look up words in third party applications. This is done via the Options > Hotkey menu. The program supports both a one-click look up and a traditional keyboard shortcut look up hotkey.

The program preferences can be used to change the English locale (you are asked during installation to pick one), to enable vulgar or offensive words under synonyms and suggestions or to make the program stay always on top in the operating system.

The program is offered as a free and pro version for Windows and a version for Apple’s iPhone. Interested users can download the free version from the developer website or purchase the pro version from this page.

Verdict

Wordweb Pro is a sophisticated English thesaurus and dictionary. The program’s easy to use, integrates well with all kinds of applications and shines thanks to its ability to integrate third party services in the interface.

Giveaway

We have ten Wordweb Pro licenses to give away. Leave a comment below for a chance to win one of those licenses. Please let us know how you look up words currently.

The Online Etymology Dictionary is available for free on the Internet. You can enter a word, or part of a word, a suffix for instance, that you are interested in in the form on the frontpage or start your search with a click on one of the letters of the alphabet.

If you’d enter Etymology for instance you get the following information:

late 14c., ethimolegia “facts of the origin and development of a word,” from O.Fr. et(h)imologie (14c., Mod.Fr. étymologie), from L. etymologia, from Gk. etymologia, properly “study of the true sense (of a word),” from etymon “true sense” (neut. of etymos “true, real, actual,” related to eteos “true”) + -logia “study of, a speaking of” (see -logy). In classical times, of meanings; later, of histories. Latinized by Cicero as veriloquium. As a branch of linguistic science, from 1640s. Related: Etymological; etymologically.

Information usually consists of one or multiple sentences. The related information are unfortunately not displayed as links, which means that you have to manually copy and paste them to perform a search on them.

One of the things that I like to do is to look up suffixes and prefixes, as they can help you get an understanding of a word even if you do know know what it means exactly. The suffix -itis for instance denotes diseases characterized by inflammation.

The etymology dictionary makes a handy bookmark for users who like to look-up word meanings and a word’s history. Just head over to the site and start searching, and maybe share a word you discovered with the rest of us.

One of the tools I take advantage of is a thesaurus. Since using a paper thesaurus is so ’80s, it’s almost a necessity to have one in the electronic form. My favorite to use is a combination of the tried and true WordNet and the GUI front-end Artha. With this combination you have a thesaurus at the ready with a simple hot key combination. Let’s take a look at installing and using this handy tool.

The tools

You may have heard of WordNet before. It’s a very handy command-line interface for the WordNet lexical database. By itself, WordNet is not terribly helpful (unless you are using it for writing scripts or applications). When combined with a front-end however, WordNet is very powerful. There are many front ends for WordNet, but one of the easiest to use is Artha. Artha is a free, cross-platform thesaurus that depends upon WordNet for the backend.

Installation

The installation of these two tools is simple. You can either search for them and install them from within your Add/Remove Software tool (search for “wordnet” and “artha” – no quotes), or you can install them via the command line. Let’s install from the command line. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo apt-get install wordnet artha.
3. Type your sudo password when prompted.
4. Accept all dependencies (if necessary).

That’s it. Once installed you will find Artha in Applications > Accessories.

Usage

There are two ways you can use Artha:

• From the Artha window.
• As a hot key tool.

Figure 1

The most obvious way to use Artha is from the Artha window (see figure 1). From within that window you can enter a word in the Query section and hit the Search button. This will bring up all of the information about the word you chose. As you can see, I searched for the word Linux.

Figure 2

The second, and more efficient, way to use Artha is as a hot key tool. When you close Artha (by default) it will minimize to the notification area so it’s still running in the background. To look up a word all you have to do is highlight a word (in any application) and click the hot key combination Ctrl-Alt-w. When you do this a notification window will appear with the information about the word (see Figure 2).  If you hit the hot key combination a second time, the Artha window will appear with the information about your selected word.

Final thoughts

Writers tools are a must have for anyone looking to make their work more efficient and accurate. If you’re looking for a solid thesaurus tool, look no further than WordNet and Artha.

Lingoes is a free dictionary and text translation software for the Windows operating system. The application offers an incredible feature set for a free program, more about that later in the review.

The program ships with an English dictionary and integration of multiple online translation services. Free dictionary files for additional languages are offered at the developer website. They need to be downloaded, unpacked and then loaded into the application.

All dictionaries are accessible at the same time. Words or phrases can be looked up by entering them in the search form on top of the program. Lingoes will automatically display the best match, and adjacent words in its interface.

The word definitions and phonetic form are displayed on the results page, along with the dictionary it has been found in. Phrases can also be picked with the mouse directly in the sidebar. Lingoes tries to automatically match the phrase to one of the installed dictionaries. It is possible to select a specific dictionary instead if the user wants to look up a phrase in one of the available dictionaries. Otherwise, the first matching dictionary will be used for the definition.

Dictionaries are added in the dictionary options menu. Here it is possible to install or uninstall dictionaries

A right-click on a word or phrase opens a context menu with several options, including possibilities to let the program pronounce the selected text, and search or print it.

A click on text translation in the main menu opens a small text input form in the program. Text entered into the form can be translated using one out of 13 different translation services ranging from Google Translate to Baidu Translation and Yahoo Babelfish.

The translated text is directly displayed in the program interface.

Text translation and dictionary look ups are the two main features of Lingoes. Hotkeys are available to use the program’s functionality on a system wide level.

This feature worked nicely in all tested programs, from Firefox over Thunderbird to Microsoft Office. The program hotkeys are defined in the program configuration. Here are the most important standard hotkeys:

• Alt-P: Pronounce
• Ctrl-F12: Speak selected text
• Ctrl-Alt-F12: Stop speaking
• Alt-G: Enable / Disable capture word on screen
• Alt-Z: Enable / Disable translate selected text

The speech functionality uses build in text to speech capabilities of the operating system, with an option to download the free Natural Voice engine pack from the developer website.

Lingoes is an excellent program for users who need dictionary and / or text translation functionality on a regular basis. The program is available as a portable version or installer, and can be extended to work with more than 80 different languages.

Aspell is an interactive, command-line spell checking tool. It’s really easy to use, reliable, and flexible. You can even use aspell to generate word lists for tools like password cracking tools (and we’d only use those types of tools when we have lost our own passwords right!). In this article I will show you how install and use the command line tool aspell.

Installation

In most cases, aspell should be installed on your machine as it is used by a number of applications. In the event it is not, the installation is simple. Naturally, since aspell is a command-line tool, let’s install it via the command line. This installation can be done with a single command like so:

sudo apt-get install aspell

The above is for Ubuntu and/or Debian-based distributions. If you are using a Fedora-like distribution (think rpm-based), you could install with the command:

yum install aspell

There may, or may not, be dependencies to install along with aspell which your installer should pick up.

That’s it. You should now have a working copy of aspell installed.

Usage

The basic usage of aspell is as such:

aspell [options] <command> file

Figure 1

The above may seem a bit confusing, but remember, since aspell is used by numerous applications, it is a very powerful tool. That power can be simplified very easily. Let’s first take a look at how aspell can be used to spell check a file. Say you have a file, my_file.txt, that you need checked. From the command line you could issue:

aspell -c my_file.txt

For example’s sake I copied text from a recent article I wrote and named it my_file.txt. When I run aspell against that file it looks like what you see in Figure 1. As you can see, what aspell will do is step through the file, word by word, and check the spelling. When aspell comes across a word it thinks is incorrect you get a list of possible solutions that you can choose from. Choose your solution and aspell will move on to the next word. It’s really quite simple.

Use the aspell dictionary

Aspell can be used in many ways. One very interesting way is to take advantage of the included dictionary. Let’s say you need to generate an alphabetized word list (I had to do this recently to try to crack a forgotten password for a client – it was completely legit). To do this I took advantage of aspell’s dictionary like so:

Download the specific aspell dictionary I needed from here.

Unpack the dictionary with the commands bunzip2 aspell-XXX.tar.bz2 and tar xvf aspell-XXX.tar (Where XXX is the release number).

1. Change into the aspell-XXX directory.
2. Expand the .wl files with the command preunzip *wl
3. Merge the dictionary files into one file with the command sort –unique –ignore-case *wl > wordlist.txt.
4. Convert the list to UTF-8 with the command iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t UTF-8 list.txt >utf_wordlist.txt.

Now you will have a word list, containing a single word per line, thanks to the aspell dictionaries. Pretty cool.

Final thoughts

Aspell is a very powerful tool. But don’t think that its only use is for external applications. Because this is Linux, you can also take advantage of the tools that other tools take advantage of. If you need more information on aspell (and all of it’s options and commands – there are a LOT of them), issue the command man aspell to find out more.

Here is how it works. The program is portable but requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 to be installed on the computer system. Windows Vista and Windows 7 come with this Framework by default and most XP users should have it installed as well.

The dictionary software will display its interface which is set to be always on top by default. The user can now enter a word directly into the interface or use one of the shortcuts to feed the program from within other applications.

To look up a word in the Google Dictionary a user would simply select a word or phrase in the active application, for instance a web browser, Microsoft Word document or email client, and press the [Alt Z] shortcut to send that phrase to the dictionary software which will automatically display the requested information in its interface. The middle-mouse button is also configured to send the phrase or word to the dictionary application. This might interfere with other add-ons or functions in specific programs. Both the hotkey and mouse option can be edited in the options of the software to avoid conflicts.

Additional shortcuts become available if the interface of Dictionary.net is the active window. The hotkey [Alt T] will translate the selected text by trying to automatically identify the language and displaying the most likely result.

The hotkey [Alt W] will display definitions of the word or phrase in the program’s interface. The shortcut [Alt D] finally will display the Google Dictionary entry of the selected phrase in the program. Links that are displayed are opened in the default web browser. It is furthermore possible to save results as htm or txt files, open supported document formats for automatic translation and to configure a proxy server is that is necessary.

Dictionary.net is a lightweight software program that combines Google Dictionary, Google Translate, Google Suggest and word definitions in one interface. It can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It has a size of only 161 Kilobytes.

Here is how the Firefox add-on works. Wikilook offers several methods of looking up words on web pages. The unobtrusive approach works by pressing the shift key and moving the mouse over a word that needs to be looked up in a dictionary.

This will automatically open a small popup window next to the word or phrase that should be looked up in the dictionary. The word definition will stay on the screen until the left mouse button is pressed by the user which closes the popup window.

Word phrases can also be looked up in dictionaries. This is done by selecting the phrase with the left-mouse button before pressing shift and holding the mouse cursor over the phrase. This will then look up the selected phrase in the dictionary. It is possible to follow links that are displayed in the dictionary popup window. A left-click would open the page in the same tab. A middle-click or pressing Ctrl while left-clicking will open the link in a new tab instead.

WikiLook can also look up words in Wikipedia and Uncyclopedia. These look ups are initiated by pressing the Ctrl or Alt keys and right-clicking on a word or phrase that should be looked up. These functionality did not work properly on our Windows XP test system with Firefox 3.5.2 installed. It could be that another Firefox add-on interfered with this option though. If any of you who install the add-on can get this to work let us know.

The English pages of Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Uncyclopedia are used by default. Users who want to access dictionary definitions in other languages can change the English pages in the options easily to other language pages. The add-on comes with advanced settings that can only be accessed in the about:config menu. Easiest way to do so is to filter for wikilook in the configuration menu.

Most of the configuration settings define aspects of the popup window that is displaying the dictionary definitions.

Wikilook provides one of the most unobtrusive ways of looking up words in dictionaries saving users who do so regularly lots of time.

I am currently trying to learn French and German and often find myself using many computer-based resources to ease my learning, some obvious, like dictionaries, and some not-so, like podcasts.

Dictionaries

Different languages generally have different online dictionaries. For German, I often find myself using dict.cc, whilst for French, I use Reverso. The best way to find dictionaries is to Google, but one option to definitely consider is the ever-growing Wiktionary. Effectively every language has a Wiktionary and whilst it can be difficult to navigate, it is quite large and the range of languages makes it amazing.

Verb conjugators

Verbix is another web-based tool. It allows you to conjugate verbs, and even supports irregular ones.

The free web-based tool supports verb conjugation in 97 languages, ranging from Afrikaans, to Milanese, to Old English to Welsh! They offer Windows shareware which supports over 300 languages.

Verbix also offers a tool too which analyses text and guesses its language.

Podcasts

Podcasts are a very useful way to perfect your listening.

It is very useful for me to hear a native German or a Francophone to speak.

Browsing iTunes will obviously bring up many possibilities.

My suggestions? For German, use Slow German. For French, try One thing in a French day. Naturally, I can’t make suggestions for other languages!

Vocabulary trainers

One of the best ways to learn is purely to repeat.

Many vocabulary trainers are available. These allow you to input words, or use preprepared word lists, and then be tested on them. The trainers compile statistics so you can identify weak points etc.

For OS X, try the freeware Vocab. A wide-range of options exist for Windows users; ProvaLingua seems popular. Another option, which also works under Linux, is this program.

Wikipedia

I already mentioned that Wiktionary exists in many languages, but so does Wikipedia.

To improve your knowledge of a foreign language, try reading an article on your native language Wikipedia and then on a foreign one. It won’t be the same word for word, but many ideas will be similar so you should be able to pick out some key words.

Wikipedia is also a good way to find technical vocabulary in a foreign tongue.

The free version of this extension comes with support for the languages English, German and French and offers support to add additional dictionaries in csv format. The commercial version which is available for roughly 5€ supports the popular .dict format as well.

Translations are obviously available in both directions but those have to be selected separately. If you come upon a text that mixes languages you have to switch. Say you got a text that uses German and English words. You have to select if you want to translate German into English or English into German from the toolbar and need to switch if you encounter words in the second language.

Translations work pretty well. The word has to be clicked on and the translation will appear instantly in the toolbar along with the selected word in the original language.

The extension does have some shortcomings that are dealt with in the commercial version. It’s definitely easier to add .dict files than .csv dictionaries. The free version does not recognize phrases and has no means to add new words from within the application. It still might be helpful if you regularly work with German, English and French documents and are not fluent in at least one of the languages.

The extension works well with the latest Open Office 3 beta and all supported operating systems.

Both methods are not really practicable. The author of tiny Spell seemed to have the same thoughts and decided to create a software that would work as an universal spell checker in Windows using the least amount of resources possible.

Tiny Spell checks all words typed in Windows against an English-American dictionary with more than 110000 words. This is done on the fly and the program plays a sound and changes its icon in the system tray whenever it discovers a word that seems to be spelled wrong.

The clipboard is monitored as well. It is then possible to take a look at the suggestions by either clicking on the icon in the system tray or pressing a hotkey that lists suggestions. The selected word can optionally be automatically copied to the clipboard or pasted into the document of the misspelled word.

Many Windows applications have built-in spell checking but others do not. TinySpell is convenient software available in a free version and you can use it to add spell checking to any application. There is a paid version available with more features, but the free version will suffice for most practical purposes. The Notepad in Windows 7 is a handy tool but does not feature spell checking, for example. If you want to add spell checking to the Notepad or any other application in Windows, this is a great way to do it.
The download link for tinySpell is as follows: tinySpell Homepage

The installation is simple. Just follow the prompts. After tinySpell has been installed, you will find a shortcut icon on the desktop. You can access tinySpell from this desktop icon or from the System Tray Icon. To begin, examine all of the settings to determine if you would like to make any display modifications. Right-click the System Tray Icon. This opens the Context Menu. Select Settings.

Click Add to include all the applications you wish to use tinySpell with. The easiest way to go about this depends on how many applications you want to enable the feature with versus the number of applications you do not want to use with tinySpell. At the top of the window, if Enabled is highlighted, you will be adding applications with which tinySpell will be disabled. If Disabled is highlighted, tinySpell will only be enabled with applications you add to the list.

Add any words to the dictionary whenever you want to. Go to the context menu and select Dictionary.

The spelling of a word can be checked ahead of time by clicking on Open spelling window in the Context Menu. This will open the spell check window. When a misspelled word is typed in, it comes up red.

If you click the check box to the right of the word entry, it will give you a list of correct spelling options. For more complex words, there may be no suggestions. In this case, you will have to add it to the dictionary. Feel free to experiment with it to get a feel for the different possibilities.

The result is displayed in the same window that you marked the word in. It will be displayed on the right side by default but this can be changed. Almost everything can be changed. You can select different keys that trigger a search and add new sites to Look it up. It is also possible to change existing ones, if you prefer for instance the French Wikipedia service you can easily change the url of the Wikipedia entry to the French version.

Last but not least you can change the way the results are shown on the website. You can change size, appearance and everything else by using css. The default settings are fine nevertheless and only few users really need to change anything here.

It delivers what the firefox dictionary can’t. You may lookup words by simply pressing a hotkey, the word will be looked up and explained in great detail in the sage. If the word does not exist in the dictionary it presents a list of words that look similar or use the wildcard button to find the word you are looking for.

The great thing about the sage is not that it is easy to use. It’s purpose is not to deliver fast results, the process to lookup a word is simply to slow to be effective (mark a word, hit the hotkey, look it up in the sage, manually edit the word). The sage is effective when it comes to understanding words that you do not know. It also helps by being able to work with almost any other program on your computer.

As you all know the firefox dictionary is restricted to firefox and thunderbird, what if you want to write something in an instant messenger ?  The Sage has a history function, can stay on top if you like. It displays synonyms and hypernyms while looking up the word and is able to create anagrams from the word as well.

Oh, the hotkey is CTRL+SHIFT+A, took a while to look it up in the documentation.