As in Dizionario italiano-inglese WordReference
As most users would know, when you don’t recall the meaning of a word you have the option of selecting it to see a pop-up which contains a definition from Google.
You can select Google Translate as a “go to” option, which will (or should!) get you the same result as the Google translation in the popup. You can go to Google Images (for what that’s worth since Google’s image search is notoriously bad, but with nouns you may get lucky), Forvo for pronunciation, or Tatoeba for the sentence’s origin. The only one that is really a “dictionary” (if one uses the term charitably) is Wiktionary… and I reeeeeaaally hate going to Wiktionary.
This is why:
Now, I’m sure that the information is completely accurate. It’s also completely and utterly useless when what you want is the word’s meaning.
When you click through to the link to the main verb you get this:
So rich, so detailed, you finally get A meaning. One. No examples, no synonyms. Basically you get Google Translate again, just with more clicks.
Now compare that to Word Reference:
Synonyms, example sentences, different nuanced meanings.
I know that there isn’t an infinite amount of space on that dialog, so I’m not necessarily asking for Word Reference to be added to it. Nor would I suggest that Wiktionary be removed because I’m conscious that while I think it’s a waste of space, others may not.
What I would like to see, though I realise that I’d be pushing my luck with this suggestion since it would involve a bit of coding effort, would be for us to be able to select up to 5 different lookup sources of our choice. I would dump Wiktionary as soon as look at it if I was given the choice to make room for Word Reference.
I’d probably swap out one of the others for https://www.treccani.it/ if I had a choice, though I’m aware that that one is very language specific. Rather than relying on Clozemaster coders to generate a link to every possible reference combination, a way around this would be to require us to specify the links for any reference source since the sources are pretty much always in the form URL/WordBeingLookedUp.