May 08, '09 07:30:03AM • Contributed by: Sesquipedalian
As we all know, Leopard's Spotlight can supply definitions of words. These definitions are pulled directly from Dictionary.app, and make a quick and convenient way to look up a word.
But what if you don't want to look up a word in the New Oxford American Dictionary? What if instead you want Spotlight to look up words in the thesaurus, or to find English translations of German words (or vice-versa) in the BeoLingus German-English dictionary plug-in?
The answer is simple. Spotlight gets its definitions from the first source in the source list of Dictionary.app's preferences. Just drag your desired dictionary to the top of the list, and its definitions will be used in Spotlight.
This seems to work for all normal dictionaries, whether built-in or supplied by third party plug-ins. However, it does not work for Wikipedia (Spotlight will skip it and move on to the next source in the list), which is fine since the Spotlight menu only shows the first few words of a definition anyway, which is hardly useful for Wikipedia entries.
