Spotlight + Dictionary is a buggy delight
Dictionary’s Spotlight integration is a delight, but contains a few unfortunate bugs. To find a few of them, look up, well, delight:
Then delighted:
Bug: Spotlight displays for
delighted the same verb definition as it did for delight, rather than the adjective definition.
Now, you may be thinking, it’s also a past tense verb, but Spotlight presents a special display for past tense verbs:
(Note the space before the period. The horror!)
and combinations:
No, it’s clear that Spotlight ignores many adjectives for some reason. Like lazily:
Now try delightedly:
Bug: Spotlight displays no dictionary match for the adverb delightedly, though it’s of course listed in Dictionary.
And it’s not that Spotlight doesn’t like adverbs, since slowly works fine:
Dictionary’s Spotlight support is riddled with these inconsistencies. They may seem trivial, but they are not: when you type a word into Spotlight to see the Dictionary definition and that definition doesn’t appear, is it because you’ve misspelled the word, or is it because it’s just not being displayed?
As an example, is it recurrance—or recurrence? You know it’s one of them, but which?
Spotlight can’t help, because it shows results for neither!
I’m delighted to say that all these examples work correctly in the Snow Leopard beta.
I’m not quite convinced these are Spotlight bugs, but rather that Spotlight is simply showing specific parts of a given entry.
Upon opening the Dictionary entry you can see that “delight” and “delighted” are part of the same entry for the word “delight.” Spotlight apparently only shows the first definition of an entry. Type “delightful” into Spotlight, however, and you’ll get a different definition because it’s actually a different entry — a different page, if you will — in the Dictionary application. “Delightedly” doesn’t come up because it’s a derivative, and derivatives aren’t listed. This is why “recurrence” doesn’t show up as well, though “recur” certainly does.
So the rules when Spotlighting word definitions are, I agree, often a bit less than helpful, but they do seem to be fairly consistent.
-systemsboy
Never thought to use Spotlight to get to the dictionary!
Why not just open up the dictionary program? I have mine sitting in my dock, where it’s just one click away. Others use a dedicated keystroke for it (you can even change it via System Preferences, Keyboard).
It’s a delight!
robinson, I do use Dictionary a lot, but when I’ve already typed a word like recurrence and have a nagging worry I may have misspelled it, Spotlight is not only quicker, but doesn’t have to be quit afterwards.
systemsboy, as an engineer, I can appreciate why derivatives aren’t listed, but as a user, I cannot. I did notice the implementation details you mention, but that’s just it—they’re implementation details. When the advertised feature is that Spotlight displays Dictionary entries for the search term, that’s exactly what the user has a right to expect.
Recurrenceis a word, so it should appear in Spotlight; anything less should, I think, be considered a bug. In other words, it may not be an implementation bug—the feature may be working precisely as designed by the engineers—but it is certainly a feature bug.These are admittedly quibbles, since having Dictionary appear in Spotlight at all has been surprisingly useful, certainly useful enough to get me to post about it! But after repeatedly going to Spotlight to spot-check a work and failing to see that word listed, I realized the limited implementation was seriously hampering the feature’s usefulness.
I guess I’m just making the distinction between something that’s intended vs. unintended. However poor an implementation — and I certainly agree that it is poor — it seems to be the intended one. Nevertheless, I think we can agree that it defies user expectation and limits the usefulness of the feature, and, whatever you call it, it should be corrected.
-systemsboy