When I was a student I came discovered a PC World CD containing tons of e-books sourced from Project Gutenberg website. This included complete works of Sherlock Holmes, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackray, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many more. I spent many months going through all those e-books. At that time, whenever I came across an previously unseen word, I would pick up my big and bulky Oxford dictionary to look with those words.
But now things have become much easier. We can enjoy reading e-books from Project Gutenberg in a web browser and check the definitions of not so easy words using a web browser extension called “Cambridge Dictionary Lookup”. The extension offers many different ways of looking up words’ definitions.
The easiest way to use it is to just select a word, right-clicking on it and then selecting Cambridge Dictionary from the right-click context-menu. It will then open a small window display the definition of that selected word. The definition includes examples and pronunciations in both US English and UK English.
Another way to lookup a word in Cambridge Dictionary is by clicking on its small icon in the toolbar. In the small window, you can enter the word that you want to lookup and then click on the search button. This window also displays the previous look-ups of various words so you can see their definitions instantly again.
The extension is not limited to looking up English words or phrases in English only. It supports the word definitions in many other international languages such as Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Russian, German, Norwegian, Italian, Chinese etc. Cambridge Dictionary Lookup is a very useful Chrome browser extension that can make reading literature in the web browser a fun experience.
You can get the Cambridge Dictionary extension for Chrome browser from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cambridge-dictionary-look/cppdeppdfkcdmmhnocldacomdeilfbei/.