We have already posted a couple of articles taking about online dictionaries, I recently came across this dictionary called Definr, and it claims to be an ‘incredibly fast dictionary’ and probably nobody can deny that, yeah!! It’s fast for sure.

Definr : Online Dictionary

Here is a small animation, have a look at the working of Definr.

How Definr works

You can get to know about the backend of Definr on the about page, which says -

“Definr.com is a fast, free dictionary based on Princeton’s open WordNet 2.0.

The website framework is Ruby on Rails. Looking up words in a dictionary is easy, so we do that with MySQL and cache the top 10,000 definitions in memory.

Doing word completion (a.k.a. auto-complete, auto-suggest, globbing) is not easy, at least not when you have to search through 200,000 words for every keystroke. So our word completion is done in a C module for Ruby, and the word completion server is separate from the rest of the site.

With the DefinrBot algorithm, we can do 190,000 word completions per second without caching, and that translates to about 10,000 completions per second once the Ruby layer is factored in.”

Thanks to Christian von Kleist, for giving us Definr.

You can try the tools page to learn some more methods to use the Definr on fly, however the method which I like most is, Method 3:

Use Ctrl+Enter, In Firefox’s address bar, type definr/hangover and press Ctrl+Enter to look up the word “hangover”. Firefox will type the “http://” and “.com” parts for you. This works with every browser, not only with FF, as ‘Ctrl+Enter’ has same result for every browser.

Try Definr and share your experiences with us, also tell us which online / offline dictionary you prefer.