New York Times Dictionary Feature

January 12th, 2007 by Mike

Did you know that if you press the ALT button and click on any word on the New York Times website a pop-up window opens with the word’s definition? The feature is powered by Answers.com.

Does anyone know when they added this feature? Not that the newspaper uses to many 10 cent words, but the feature is clean and useful. Now, if the ALT-click opened a window with a Wikipedia entry for the clicked word, that would be extrememly useful.

Update: It appears that this feature works on individual articles, but not on section pages (e.g. the homepage, business, sports, etc.)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Learning, Media, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “New York Times Dictionary Feature”

  1. Gina M. Larson Says:
    January 17th, 2007 at 2:15 pm

    Hi Mike,

    The feature was added September 20th. You can read the press release from our site here:
    http://ir.answers.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=211745

    CBSNews.com also has a similar function(only you double-click on a word) on their site for all their articles.

    The technology behind this is a free software that Asnwers.com calls 1-Click Answers. From the Answers.com site, you can download 1-Click for free and then be able to “Alt-Click” anywhere on your computer. It works in emails, word documents, power points, IM, etc.

    It’s cool stuff — check it out at:
    http://www.answers.com/main/product_info.jsp

  2. Mike Says:
    January 23rd, 2007 at 12:13 pm

    Thanks for the info Gina!

    Your comment got caught up in my span filter because (it holds any omment with 2 or more links). Sorry about the delay in approving it.

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