Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

394 switching to the mac: the missing manual

graphically elegant definition, complete with sample sentence and pronunciation

guide.

Tip: If you don’t recognize a word in the definition, double-click that to look up its definition. You can then

double-click again in that definition—and on, and on, and on.

(You can then use the History menu, the c-[ and c-] keystrokes, or the Back and forward buttons on the

toolbar, to go back and forward in your chain of lookups.)

It’s worth exploring the DictionaryÆPreferences dialog box, by the way. There,

you can choose U.S. or British pronunciations, adjust the font size, and indicate

whether you prefer synonyms or definitions.

• Press F12. That’s right: The Dictionary is one of the widgets in Dashboard (page

108).

• Control-click a highlighted word in a Cocoa program. From the shortcut menu,

choose Look Up in Dictionary. The Dictionary program opens to that word.

(And if hauling open the entire Dictionary application seems a bit overkill, visit

its Preferences dialog box and choose “Open Dictionary panel.” Now you’ll get a

compact, handy panel that pops right out of the highlighted word instead.)

• Point to a word in any Cocoa program and press Ctrl-c-D. That keystroke makes

the definition panel sprout right out of the word you were pointing to. (The ad-

vantage of this technique, of course, is that you don’t have to highlight the word

first.) ...