Dedoimedo’s latest review on Krunner, spiked my interest even more for an app. i have rarely used:
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/plasma-krunner.html
It’s good to quickly find word definitions in English with it, but what about other languages?
Well… I mean, what plugin/service do you use for English definitions? They didn’t cover any dictionary tools in that article, at least, so presumably you’re just doing a web search for the word?
One option would be to add Google Translate to its list of web services to search. In Chrome I have Translate’s default search engine (which uses the URL http://translate.google.com/?source=osdd#auto|auto|%s) aliased to the keyword “trans”. That way I can type something like this into the location bar:
trans C'est la vie
And get an autodetected translation from French to English. (Complete with a ‘Did you mean?’ suggestion offering the correct form, “Ç’est la vie”.) A similar thing could be set up in Krunner using the Web Search Keywords preferences, bound to a similarly brief shortcut string.
The tricky thing about searching for definitions of foreign words is that they’ll mostly come from dictionaries for that language, meaning the definitions will be in the same foreign language. And if they’re not English words, they won’t appear in English-language dictionaries.
What you need in those cases is a translating dictionary. Fortunately, there’s one obvious example: Wiktionary.
The English-language Wiktionary, according to its mainpage stats, currently contains “6,683,074 entries with English definitions from over 4,200 languages”. I have the search-keyword ‘wikt’ in Chrome tied to searches there, using the search URL https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=%s.
So a quick,
wikt vie
Brings up an English explanation of what ‘vie’ means in all of the languages where they have a listing for it — including the French definition, “life”.
If I wanted a search that went straight to definitions from a particular language — say, to search for the meaning of French words, specifically — I could bind a keyword like wiktfr to a URL like https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=%s#French
Again, similar bindings could be set in the Web Search Keywords preferences of Krunner.
Think that Wiktionary option is what i’d be looking for.
Thanks!