Lingro: Look up definitions, translations on any page

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Lingro: Look up definitions, translations on any page

by Brad Linder Jun 10th 2008

Ever find yourself puzzling over an unfamiliar word on a web page? Sure, you could open a new browser tab and look it up at Dictionary.com. Or you could just drag a Lingro bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and hit it to make every word on a web page clickable. When you select a word a definition will pop up, assuming you've set the tool to translate from English to English. You can also click on the flag iconts to translate words into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish, or Swedish.

The definitions are culled from publicly available dictionaries and user contributions filed under a Creative Commons license. So if you find a word without a definition, a message will pop up asking if you'd like to contribute one. Of course, the odds of your clicking the word if you already knew the meaning are pretty slim (unless you're say, writing a review of Lingro).

You can also use Lingro the old fashioned way, by visiting the service's home page and typing in a word or entering a web address to translate. There's even a service that lets you upload a file from your desktop for translation into another language.

Honestly, we didn't have much luck translating entire web sites. But Lingro's dictionary definitions and single word translations seem pretty good.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Tags: dictionary, lingro, translate, translation

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Christina Warren said 9:23PM on 6-10-2008

OR you could use Safari for Mac which has built-in system-wide dictionary support (thesaurus and Google lookup too). ;-)

Minko Kissiov said 8:34AM on 6-11-2008

Or you can download the app from Answers.com and not only lookup words and terms in a web page but also on any text or document editor on your computer. Also it is Vista compatible. I thought it was pretty cool.

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