Inline Search & Lookup for Chrome lets you look words up, fast

Inline Search & Lookup is a neat quick-reference Chrome extension.

You highlight a word and Alt-click it (or hit Alt-W), and a small popup window is instantly shown, containing the search results for the selected word in any of a number of resources that you've selected.

The extension comes with support for a large number of search engines, dictionaries, and reference websites, but you can easily add more sites yourself. One nice feature is the ability to have it scroll down automatically to where the definition (or other content you want to see) is. You specify a CSS ID, and the popup window just scrolls down to it. Of course, you only need to specify an ID if you're setting up a new source; it is already set for some of the sources that come with the extension.

One oddity is that I could not figure out how to select a different source on the fly. I mean, you can set a preferred source in the extension's configuration options, but what if I want to look the word up somewhere else? I might have missed something here, but I really could not figure out how to do this.

Other than this issue (which can be a deal-breaker for some), the extension is quite nice. The developer also specifies a couple of alternatives right on the extension's page in case you're looking for something similar but this is not quite it.

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Tags: dictionary, education, lookup, reference