Look up words in Gnome Shell
Feature summary
An easier and quicker way to look up definitions of words and phrases from anywhere on Gnome.
How would you like it to work
Select a word in any window and in any application and get a definition of that word as a Gnome notification.
Relevant links, screenshots, screencasts etc.
I used macOS before moving to Linux / Gnome and on macOS it was easy to look up word definitions anywhere. I used to use a gesture on a trackpad but I believe you could do the same by Control-clicking a word as well. Example here:
On Linux, there's Artha and it worked great but it hasn't been updated in a long time and doesn't seem to work any more on Fedora 32 / Gnome 3.36:
- It works offline using a database provided by WordNet
- It allows you to select a word in any window and get a definition within a notification like this:
Current best option seems to be to copy a word and paste it into Gnome Dictionary but that's slower and bit more cumbersome. It would be great to have a Gnome native look up option for students and readers in general as well.
There was another discussion on this topic here but Gnome Dictionary might be a better place for it.