Turn Your Firefox Address Bar Into Awesome Word Lookup Dictionary

Often we need particular meaning of some word and we end up searching multiple online dictionaries for the correct usage or definition. Do you know that Google also provides dictionary functionality to its users free of cost and with much more features than others? We will use this Google dictionary to turn our Firefox address bar into quick and useful word lookup guide.

Many of you must have idea about the “I’m feeling lucky” feature of the Firefox address bar. For others –

You don’t have to go to Google.com every time for reaching a specific website whose exact spelling you don’t remember or when you know that it would be the first result from Google.
Just enter your query/keywords in Firefox address bar and hit Enter key. Firefox will assume that you are doing Google’s “I am feeling lucky” search and will directly land you at that site. For example, type ‘wikipedia India‘ in the address bar and hit Enter key. Firefox will directly take you to Wikipedia’s page on India.

The magic behind this trick is possible because of little known Keyword.URL defined in your Firefox configuration settings. Instead of always getting results from Google, You can also set your location bar for other search engines as described in thisarticle.

We will use the same trick to convert our Firefox address bar into useful word definition and lookup guide. Just follow these simple steps –

1) Go to address bar and type about:config . Press Enter key and accept the warning. You can now see most of the firefox settings.
2) Write keyword.url in the top filter keyword textbox.
3) Double click on the filtered result to change its value.
4) Paste the following into the keyword.URL pop-up box

http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&q=

5) Click OK and you are done.

To check, just open another tab and type some random word into Firefox location/address bar and hit Enter key. For example, angel. You will see Google’s dictionary result for the given word. Not only you can find the word meaning, synonyms, related phrases, pronunciation and web definitions but you can also star or bookmarks words for future.

Along with these goodies, Google Dictionary also helps you find translated meanings of the words. To use this feature, select a language from the drop down next to Google’s logo and type your word to translate and get its meaning.

To revert to traditional Google I’m feeling lucky search, use the same steps, but this time paste the following string into Keyword.URL value –

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&esrch=BetaShortcuts&gfns=1&q=

My favorite features are word bookmarking and audio pronunciation. What are yours?

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