The Sage English Dictionary and Thesaurus

I'm very happy that Firefox 2.0 has a build in (English) dictionary which helps me correct most of the mistakes I make while writing articles here on Ghacks. The build in dictionary is great but lacks certain features and that is why I went on a hunt for a better dictionary. Look what I found in my net today: The Sage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus.

It delivers what the Firefox dictionary can't. You may look up words by simply pressing a hotkey, the word will be looked up and explained in great detail in the program interface. 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 look up 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 as you can use it in combination with every other program on your system and not only Firefox.

As you all know the Firefox dictionary is restricted to Firefox and Thunderbird. What if you want to write test in an instant messenger?  The Sage has a history feature, can stay on top if you like. It displays synonyms and hypernyms while looking up the word can also create anagrams from words as well.

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

Update: Professional users may also be interested in the excellent WordWeb application which we reviewed a few month ago.

Advertisement