Dictionary shortcuts on macOS

Look up a word on your Mac,
including where the shortcut fails.

macOS already has a lookup. Select a word and press ⌃⌘D, or tap it with three fingers. It is fast, it is free, and you should use it. It also only works in apps built on Apple's own text views, hands you a monolingual definition by default, and forgets the word the moment the panel closes.

01 · The built in way

Control Command D, and the three finger tap

Select a word and press ⌃⌘D. You can skip the selecting and just hover the pointer over it. A small panel opens with the definition, a thesaurus entry and a Wikipedia summary if there is one.

On a trackpad, tapping a word with three fingers does the same. If nothing happens, open System Settings, then Trackpad, then Look up and data detectors, and choose between the three finger tap and a force click.

To get more than the English dictionary, open the Dictionary app, go to Dictionary then Settings, and tick the languages you want. Drag them up the list to decide which one answers first.

02 · Where it stops

Why it sometimes does nothing at all

The shortcut needs a real macOS text view. Slack, Discord, Notion, VS Code and most other apps built on web technology do not give it one. Neither do in browser PDF viewers, video players, images or remote desktop windows.

There is also the language problem. If you are reading something in a language you are learning, an English to English definition is often not the help you needed, and switching dictionaries mid paragraph gets old fast.

Then there is the forgetting. The panel closes and there is no record you ever looked at the word. Three days later you meet it again and it is new again.

03 · The other way

Look up what is on the screen instead

Press ⌥A and box the word. macOS text recognition reads that patch of screen, and the word is looked up in the sense the sentence around it is using, not as a list of every meaning it has ever had.

Because it reads pixels, the apps in the paragraph above stop being special cases. A PDF that will not select, a subtitle, a screenshot, an error dialog. All the same.

04 · Keeping them

The part the built in dictionary skips

Every word you look up is saved with the sentence it came from, in a searchable library that stays on your Mac. That pairing is the whole point: a word on its own is trivia, a word carrying the line you first hit it in has somewhere to live.

From there it exports to Anki, CSV, Excel, JSON or PDF, with the card layout picked and previewed before the file is written.

05 · The honest part

Where the text goes

Your library lives on your Mac. No account, no sync server, no ads. The picture is read on your machine and never leaves it, so nothing gets uploaded to a website.

The text you scan does go out to an AI so it can explain the word as your sentence uses it, with nothing attached that says who you are. The privacy page spells out exactly what is sent and what is kept.