This feature improves and augments the Dictionary widget from basic to powerful and on steroids.
I believe it will boost drastically efficiency of regular language researchers and language lovers.
The current dictionary widget is really nice. It is similar in 'scope' to Google's.
As someone who consults web search while writing (to recall words from meaning; reverse lookup), reading (English pronunciation 'rules' demand listening to words and not relying on spelling 😔, and for meaning), and exploring vocabulary.
There are a few nifty things which if added, would make the experience super efficient for regular users and surpass the basic dictionary widget into a dictionary widget on steroids.
All these features are actually essential (for efficiency and research) and not nice to haves.
- Not all words appear in the dictionary widget ☹. For example, words like 'amidst', 'cherry-pick',
'backporting', etc.
- Which brings me to the novel suggestion of: not relying on a single source for definitions. Instead, just as Kagi aggregates results from different search engine indices, here is the suggestion: A specialized search result aggregator for English language (common words & jargon). It looks for definitions from notable general language dictionaries (Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Vocabulary.com, Wikitionary, etc), and perhaps using AI extracts the best of the best or a summary of the definition. Because you cannot rely blindly on AI, references appear in a horizontal icons tile (showing dictionary logos) at the bottom of the widget linking to its entry at different places.
- Because English pronunciation is hard, it would be really cool if Kagi showed at least two audio snippets for how to pronounce it (alongside the IPA —which I believe everyone should learn and in the process of learning it due to its great utility).
This feature would be a tremendous efficiency gain and a wonderful convenience. It is like Kagi has a meta-dictionary widget.
