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Flying ninja upgrades

Friday January 19, 2007

In the news: Ninjawords (a fast online dictionary) hit Ajaxian, digg and StumbleUpon awhile back. Warning — the Digg comments are less than insightful.

Anyway, a few long awaited features have just landed. Here’s the run down:

  • Now using the latest dump of Wiktionary, which is the main source for definitions. This means more words and better definitions.
  • You can add ninjawords directly to your search bar if you’re running Firefox or IE7:
    searchprovider.gif
    Check out a short screencast made by Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen (hacker on Deskbar) to see how it works.
  • IE6 DOM fixes, which will make Ninjawords faster in IE6 (no, it can never be too fast)
  • Ninjawords now understands what a capital letter is, so definitions like zeitgeist work. Amazing.
  • Bug fixes for parsing and displaying definitions. There are now fewer out-of-place characters (like “*”) that show up in the definitions, and long examples are truncated more accurately.

And best of all…

Ninja thesaurus

Well, not quite, but Ninjawords can now show you synonyms. It can help you serve up insults at incredible rates:

syn1.png

syn2.png

Enjoy!

9 Comments »

  1. Re Digg, that’s why I use Only Digg News (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6017). It’s a Greasemonkey script that dumps Digg comments in the garbage where it belongs ;-). Seriously, Digg users can be SO immature.

    Said by Andrew January 19, 2007 at about 1:04 pm

  2. I had to keep looking in other dictionaries for the synonyms. It was my main concern with this excellent tool - but not any more :)

    Thanks.

    Said by George January 19, 2007 at about 1:42 pm

  3. Even though you’re already spoiling us, Phil, what do you think of adding an image to a definition? Say, when you mouse-over the word you were searching, a small (70×80px) box with an image (e.g. from image.google feeling lucky) pops-up near. Passively (via XMLHttpRequest as everything else on the site) so it doesn’t bloat the beautiful app.

    Said by George January 19, 2007 at about 4:51 pm

  4. George, that’s a very interesting idea; I’ve never thought about leveraging Google images. I’ll see what I can do.

    Said by philc January 19, 2007 at about 5:50 pm

  5. Impressive. The thesarus feature is much appreciated for us non-native speakers of english.

    Keep rocking!

    Said by Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen January 20, 2007 at about 10:10 am

  6. […] Update: lots of new stuff, and even a thesaurus. […]

    Pingback by Ninjawords - a fast online dictionary… fast like a ninja » eightpence - Phil Crosby January 20, 2007 at about 11:34 pm

  7. The fact that there’s a thesaurus with the definitions is incredible, and I really like that because for some of the work I need to do, I have to find easy, one-word definitions, and they’re all there when I look up a word.

    That’s totally awesome! I love it!

    Said by Molly March 6, 2007 at about 4:23 pm

  8. Hi, Been using ninjawords.com ever since I discovered it last Dec. Was wondering if it’s possible to add an antonym feature as well (like the synonyms)?

    Thanks.

    P.S. The best thing I like about ninjawords remains it’s speed and clutter-free interface!

    Said by Juhi April 23, 2007 at about 2:39 am

  9. ul21uukwlpqomp9w

    Said by Warren Kane November 13, 2008 at about 3:32 am

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