A Love Letter to Definr

Dear Definr:

You take my breath away.

I spend a lot of time with my fingers on the keyboard, and it's been years since I consulted a dead-tree thesaurus or dictionary. Why bother, when I've had my pick of synonyms from right within Microsoft Word or, far better, quick searches of dictionary.com and sister site thesaurus.com? I set up quick access to both in Firefox and never looked back, even when they began serving up obnoxious pop-up ads.

Then, Definr, you waltzed into my life.





I don't know much about your background, outside of what it says on your About page. You're an offshoot of the semantic lexicon called WordNet 2.0 (run by the Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton University), a database of words with labels to keep them with their closest associates.

That makes you sound deep (though I think dictionary.com might have more depth, definition-wise). But Definr, there's no doubt, you're fast. And I don't mean that in a bad way. An average of 14 milliseconds just to bring up a definition from your cache of 17,000-plus of your most requested words? In a word: Wow.

Your austere Google-esque front page, the auto-complete function as I type, even that knob-thingy on your little gray head... it all makes me swoon. That you've got a Firefox search box function and a bookmarklet to lookup selected words on the fly is just the icing on the cake.

Definr, I think I love you. Don't ever change.