Just hovering the mouse pointer over a word and then pressing the shortcut is enough to bring the dictionary window out.

Moving the pointer around this webpage while holding down the shortcut keys let's you choose different words without repeating the key press.

so I tried it in the safari browser. Doesn't work. Hi lighting the word and pressing command D merely tells the browser to add a bookmark.

So I tried it in Texedit- and I high lited a word, but it did nothing.
So I tried it in Microsoft word for man, and it pulled up the font menu....

What did I miss here...?

Mark

oops, Command- Control D

Sorry... now it works,

Thanks for the tip!

Mark

It works for me in Safari but not in TextEdit or Mail. I tried a variety of key combinations in case the hint had a typo, but no luck.

It only seems to do all that if you spell the word correctly. If you misspell the word, it will say "No entries found". You can then click on More in the corner of the dictionary window and it will suggest correct spellings of similar words.

It worked in Mail (v.2.1.1) for me, but not FileMaker (v.8) or Word or Excel (2004).

Another way to check spelling in Mail is to highlight the entire word then Control-click on it. The contextual menu will pop-up and from there you can choose Look Up in Dictionary. As much as I love keyboard comands, I prefer this control-click method to the keyboard method since the keyboard method is way to close to the same key combo as the Send command (shift-cmd-D).

In Safari and TextEdit it's only necessary to right-click on a highlighted word to get the contextual menu with the Look Up in Dictionary option.