Switching to the Mac[c] The Missing Manual

For word nerds everywhere, the Dictionary (and Thesaurus) is one of Mac OS X's most welcome features. You can look up word definitions, pronunciations, and synonymsall through an electronic version of the entire New Oxford American Dictionary and Oxford American Writers Thesaurus.

Mac OS X also comes with about a million ways to look up a word:

• Double-click the Dictionary icon . You get the window shown at top in Figure 14-5. As you type into the Spotlight-y search box, you home in on matching words; double-click a word, or highlight it and press Enter, to view a complete, typo graphically elegant definition, complete with sample sentence and pronunciation guide.

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  Tip: If you don't recognize a word in the definition, double-click that to look up its definition. You can then double-click again in that definitionand on, and on, and on.(You can then use the History menu, the -[ and -] keystrokes, or the Back and forward buttons on the toolbar, to go back and forward in your chain of lookups.)

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  It's worth exploring the Dictionary Preferences dialog box, by the way. There, you can choose U.S. or British pronunciations, adjust the font size , and indicate whether you prefer synonyms or definitions.

• Press F12 . That's right: The Dictionary is one of the widgets in Dashboard (Section 4.4).

• Control-click a highlighted word in a Cocoa program . From the shortcut menu, choose Look Up in Dictionary. The Dictionary program opens to that word. (And if hauling open the entire Dictionary application seems a bit overkill, visit its Preferences dialog box and choose " Open Dictionary panel." Now you'll get a compact, handy panel that pops right out of the highlighted word instead.)

• Point to a word in any Cocoa program and press Ctrl- -D . That keystroke makes the definition panel sprout right out of the word you were pointing to. (The advantage of this technique, of course, is that you don't have to highlight the word first.)