The New York Times has a nifty feature in their online articles, if you double click a word in an article a new browser window pops up with the definition. This isn’t a new feature, I first noticed it back in December completely by accident. I double clicked a word to highlight it for a copy & paste and voilà, instant definition goodness.
Definitions are powered by The American Heritage Dictionary and many come complete with an audio file pronunciation of the word. Along with the definition are results from Wordnet and The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia if applicable. Wordnet is a lexical database of English developed by Princeton University.
I have noticed some weirdness with the feature. For instance if you double click an adjective such as ‘the’, what will appear is the word or phrase it is describing. For instance ‘The Labor Department’ would return results for ‘Labor Department’ not ‘the’. This seems strange to me.
Maybe they reasoned everyone should know words such as the, as, or, etc. so there was no need to look them up. My problem with this is they’ve taught me double clicking on a word brings up information on that word, so when I double click on a word and receive information about the word it is modifying or describing it is a little disorienting. At first I assumed I had made a mistake and clicked on the wrong word.
This doesn’t just apply to adjectives, pronouns and such. I double clicked on the word ‘credit’ in an article on wholesale prices and received information on ‘bond market’. Don’t get me wrong I think it’s an interesting idea and implementation, but I feel it’s wrong from a user interface point of view. If they don’t want to show information on certain words that’s fine, but I would rather receive a ‘no information found’ message as opposed to information on a completely different word or phrase.
Overall I think it is a great feature and a clever idea, although some indication the feature exists would be nice. The only other thing I would note is it does not seem to work on Safari 3.1.2.
