Just a short one today to explain why I have added word definitions to the blog.
I know that many of those who have visited this blog have come from all round the world and it occurred to me that, for many, English was not their first language. It is possible that some may occasionally have trouble if I thoughtlessly use less familiar words than most of those, whose first language is English, would use in their everyday conversation.
So I looked around and discovered The Free Dictionary, which has, not only an English dictionary, but also dictionaries in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek and Russian.
If you write in any of these languages you can make two very small additions to your template code and your readers will be able to get the definition of any word in your blog by double clicking on the word. Of course this does not work on link words as you will simply open the link.
For those wishing to use the English dictionary the codes can be found on the Free Website Content – Webmaster Tools page. Option 5 will take you to the code you need for this. You may also want to include one of the other tools on your blog or web site.
If you want to use one of the other languages click on the link for that language in the left column and then select “Free Content” from the “For Webmasters” section on your chosen language page. The illustration is from the Dutch dictionary.
The first step is to go to the Layout>Edit HTML tab from your dashboard and download your template before making any changes just in case of disasters.
Next, copy the following code from the Webmaster Tools page and paste it between the head tags of your template (this script is for the English definitions):
<script src="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.js"></script>
Then modify your body tag by adding:
ondblclick="dictionary()"
So that it looks like this:
<body ondblclick="dictionary()">
This is how it looks in this template’s code after having been saved. The added code is highlighted.
</script>
<script src='http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.js'/>
</head>
<body ondblclick='dictionary()'>
<div id='outer-wrapper'>
Don’t worry about the double quotation marks in the original code as blogger will automatically change them to single quotations marks when you save the template.
Remember it is free and it could be really useful to your blog readers.
Subscribe to comments for this post (RSS)
Very interesting tool! Thanks for your helpful article! The problem of the internationalization in our time is even worse then before. And in the Internet, as a rule, multi-lingual resources of the company is, first of all, the prestige and the level of the company in his industry.
Ujin,
Thank you for that. Although this is a new blog it rapidly became clear to me that the comments and emails from this blog were from all around the world. Very few were from people whose first language was English.
I looked around for something to help them understand my articles but did not think much of the translation tools I found. So I thought that providing definitions was the best way to take a first step.