Online Tutorial   • Using the Dictionary Hot Key

Dictionary Hot Key

netTrekker partners with Ultralingua to provide feature-rich dictionaries that you can use to find definitions of a word that you do not understand. You can also choose to see words translated from English to a world language such as Spanish or German.

Clicking on launches a "dictionary-enabled" version of a website.

The Dictionary Hot Key turns every word on a dictionary-enabled site into a hotlink. Clicking on the link pops open a small dictionary window that displays a definition of that word.

Dictionary Results
When you click on the hot-linked word neighborhood, you will see this box:

Example of a Dictionary Result:

You can also click on "More Results..." to see additional results.

Due to the structure of graphics, HTML, and frames on a few websites, enabling the dictionary hot key may cause you to lose the content on some launched websites. If this should happen to you, simply close the website and relaunch the page without enabling the dictionary.

Choosing Your Dictionary Search Mode:
The Ultralingua dictionary window has several drop-down menus. The first drop-down menu lets you search for definitions in different ways:

Stemmed Search
The stemmed search mode - the default mode - returns the definition or translation of the hot-linked word. If the word is in an irregular or conjugated form, you see the root word (the stem) and its various forms.

Browsing Search
The browsing search mode returns words in an alphabetical list. You see the entries immediately after it, just as you would in a dictionary, as well as common expressions using your word.

Advanced Search
The advanced search mode gives you the option of doing case-sensitive searches, of ignoring accents, of searching within definitions of other entries for your word, and of searching for whole words only.

Choosing your dictionary
The second drop-down menu lets you choose the type of dictionary you would like to use. All of these types of dictionaries are available:

English definitions English synonyms French definitions French synonyms English -> French French -> English English -> Spanish Spanish -> English English -> German German -> English

English -> Italian Italian -> English English -> Portuguese Portuguese -> English English -> Latin Latin -> English English -> Esperanto Esperanto -> English French -> Spanish Spanish -> French

French -> German German -> French French -> Italian Italian -> French Spanish -> German German -> Spanish Spanish -> Portuguese Portuguese -> Spanish

The default is to English definitions; however, you can set your own default by going to "Preferences."

Additional Dictionary Help

Did you ever look up a word and not understand the words in the definition? Notice that the words in the dictionary window are "clickable" so that you can view meanings of unfamiliar words from the definition in a new box.