Summary: The Discourse Dictionary plugin allows a user to add the dictionary meaning of a word to the first post of a topic. Here’s a short video to demonstrate the working.
Allows a user (default to TL2) to select a dictionary meaning of a word via the composer. The selected word when hovered, will display a tooltip showing the selected meaning.
Currently supports Oxford Dictionary API.
Currently supports singular form of words i.e. fungi won’t work you’ll have to use fungus.
The meanings are cached to the db for quick loads in the future and to avoid exhausting the API thresholds.
You can tweak the values once they’re loaded in the composer.
I’m quite excited to try this plugin. Not sure how yet, but will probably figure out a way to work it in.
One thing that came to mind was how helpful this may be for language learning. I went to the Oxford Dictionary documentation and saw that it seems possible to look up words in some other languages as well: https://developer.oxforddictionaries.com/documentation/languages
I don’t know too much about Ruby programming, but from what I can see, it looks like it may be easy for me to tweak the plugin to use Spanish or Swahili by just changing the dataset: 'en-us' line to es or sw in this code block:
My intention was to just launch it and see if there’s interest in the community. This plugin is a bit special to me because I made the spec for it almost 3 years ago when I didn’t have the know how of how to build it.
The one thing which I didn’t touch was the lemma api to fetch the singular form of words. Its important because the oxford api especially(and probably others) work with singular form. That would be valuable too.