Look it up: the built-in dictionary and encyclopedia

Definitions where you're reading

Clickable concepts run throughout the learning views. Tap a word and a small closable panel gives you its definition from Wiktionary, with part-of-speech groupings and usage examples, without navigating away.

Breaking your reading to search elsewhere is more expensive than it looks: you lose your place, you land on a page that wants your attention for other reasons, and you come back having forgotten the sentence you were in the middle of. Keeping the lookup inside the page is the whole point of it.

Now it explains phrases and terms too

A dictionary only holds single words, so a phrase like “raster image” or a named method like “Bresenham's line algorithm” used to come up empty — which is a particularly annoying failure, because those are exactly the terms you stop to look up.

Now, when there's no dictionary entry, Novus Learn falls back to a short encyclopedic explanation from Wikipedia, and offers to open the full topic in the reader. Results are labelled by kind, so you can always tell whether you're reading a lexical definition or an encyclopedic summary, and by source, so the attribution to Wiktionary or Wikipedia is never ambiguous.

Two kinds of answer, and why the label matters

A definition and an explanation are different things, and conflating them is how people end up confidently wrong about a term. A definition tells you what a word means and how it is used — part of speech, senses, examples. An explanation tells you about a thing: its history, what it's for, how it relates to other things.

For “photosynthesis”, either would serve. For “model”, the difference is everything: the lexical entry covers a dozen unrelated senses, while an encyclopedic summary will pick one and run with it. Labelling which one you got means you can tell at a glance whether the answer is about the word or about a thing the word can refer to — and decide whether you need the other kind.

That is also why the fallback is a fallback rather than a merge. Novus Learn doesn't blend a lexical entry and an encyclopedic paragraph into one smooth answer, because the resulting text would have no single source to point at.

Where the lookup shows up

The panel isn't confined to a dictionary page. Clickable concepts run through the learning views, so the word you stopped on in a summary, a key point or a flashcard is the word you can look up, without switching context or losing the card you were mid-way through.

There's a standalone dictionary page too, for when looking something up is the whole task rather than an interruption to reading. It behaves identically — the same two kinds of result, the same labelling, the same links back to the source entry.

The design goal throughout is that a lookup should cost you almost nothing. If checking a word takes ten seconds and doesn't move you off the page, you'll check the words you're only 80% sure about — and those are the ones quietly costing you comprehension. If it takes a tab, a search and a scroll, you'll guess instead, and mostly you'll guess close enough to keep going and not close enough to be right.

Small conveniences that add up

• Spelling tolerance: a near-miss like “rastorize” resolves to the right article, and the panel tells you what it actually looked up.
• Look up another word without closing the panel, so one lookup can turn into three.
• Multi-word selections offer their individual words as chips, for when the phrase has no entry but its parts do.
• Every result carries its licence and a link to the original entry.
• Open the full topic in the reader when the short explanation isn't enough.

Keyless, like everything else

There's no dictionary API key to configure and no account to attach. Lookups go to the free, openly-licensed Wiktionary and Wikipedia sources, and every result carries its CC BY-SA attribution and a link to the entry it came from.

Nothing is invented at any point. A result is either a real lexical entry or a real encyclopedic summary, and if it is neither, the panel says so rather than assembling something that reads like a definition. An empty result is genuinely informative — it usually means the term is jargon, a proper noun, or a phrase whose parts you should look up separately, and the panel offers those parts as chips for exactly that reason.

The limits of a free dictionary

Coverage is Wiktionary's coverage. Common English words are well served; jargon, brand names, very new coinages and inflected forms are patchier, and some entries are far thinner than others because they were written by different people at different times.

The encyclopedic fallback fills a lot of that gap but it changes what you get: a paragraph about a concept is not the same as a definition of a word, and for an ambiguous term it may resolve to the wrong sense entirely. When precision matters — a legal or medical term, say — treat the panel as a pointer to the source rather than as an authority, and follow the link.