Using the built-in thesaurus on the Mac
March 30, 2025 at 8:21 AM by Dr. Drang
A big update to Greg Pierce’s Terminology app came out this past week, and I’m sure you’ve already read the reviews. I especially like how you can create “resources” to look up words in thesauruses, alternate dictionaries, or even on websites that are only vaguely similar to dictionaries. I used the previous versions of Terminology, so I subscribed to this new Pro version right away.
But as much as I like Terminology, I don’t use it to look up synonyms, something I do more often as I get older.
If you’ve typed an almost-right word into a text editing field and want to look up alternatives, control-click (or right-click if you’re using a mouse) on the word in question. You don’t have to select the word first—as long as your aim is decent, the Mac will know which word you’re targeting. A context menu will pop up, and the command for looking up the word will be at the top of the menu.
(This is BBEdit, but you’ll see similar context menus in pretty much every Mac app. I can’t think of one I haven’t seen it in.)
When you choose that command, a new window will appear with brief dictionary and thesaurus entries for the word.
To see all of the word’s synonyms, click the blue more that appears at the end of the thesaurus entry. I would prefer this to be an actual button, but Apple has decided—with some justification—that we’re all so used to clicking on web links that we don’t need proper buttons anymore. Anyway, after you click more, the thesaurus entry will expand to show all the synonyms:
It would be nice if you could drag or double-click to select the synonym you want, but unfortunately this is one of those windows in which normal (or even abnormal) text selection methods aren’t enabled.
Despite the inability to select a synonym, this is a nice, and probably underused, feature of macOS/OS X. It’s so good, it probably goes back to the NeXT days.
Update 30 Mar 2025 4:58 PM
Ben Millar on Mastodon reminded me of something I had a vague memory of but never used: if the blinking cursor is within or at either end of a word, you can type ⌃⌘D to execute the command. This is a faster way to get to the thesaurus if you’ve just typed the word you want to replace. The ⌃⌘D keystroke also works if you hover the pointer over a word, but that doesn’t seem natural to me.
One problem with the keyboard-only invocation of is that I don’t think there’s a way to dismiss the popup window without clicking outside it. The Escape key doesn’t do it, nor does ⌘-Period. And ⌘W tries to close the entire editing window, not just the popup. So you need some mousing to close the window, which eliminates some of the keyboard-only advantage. (Clicking the more button to see more synonyms also requires mousework.)
Unless someone educates me on a way to dismiss the popup with a keystroke, I think I’m going to stick with control-clicking and using the context menu. If I have to move my hand to the trackpad at some point, I might as well do it right away. Still, you might find this keystroke works well for you. Either way, thanks to Ben for pointing out another piece of dictionary/thesaurus UI.
Update 31 Mar 2025 8:35 AM
Leon Cowle tells me the Escape key dismisses the popup window on Ventura, so it’s likely that its failure to work on Sequoia is a regression. I suppose I should send a bug report into the void…
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It’s one thing to know there’s a better word for a concept but quite another to be able to pull that word out of the recesses of your brain. ↩
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If you have TextSniper, you can avoid typing by drawing a box around the synonym you want to use, and TextSniper will put it on the clipboard for you. I don’t do this because capturing a single word this way takes more time than typing. TextSniper is great, but it’s better used on large chunks of text. ↩