Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you
how to use the Thesaurus on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.
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Now if you do any kind of writing, whether it is writing a novel,
or just an email message, you may want to, occasionally, find different
words to use in different situations. A Thesaurus is exactly the tool for that.
It turns out there is a built-in Thesaurus that comes with your Mac. It's also there in
the iPhone and iPad, although a little harder to get to. So the first way to access the Thesaurus
on your Mac is to simply use the Dictionary App. I'm going to launch it here with Launchpad but
you can easily launch it from the Applications Folder. You can search for it with Spotlight or
any other way that you like to launch apps. Now you may think the Dictionary App is a
dictionary not a Thesaurus. But it actually has many different types of books in it. You
can see here at the top I've got Dictionary and Thesaurus. If you don't see the second
one there then go to Dictionary Settings and look through the list here. You check each
one that you want to have available to you. By default in the United States you should see the
New Oxford American Dictionary and the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus. So make sure they
are both checked. If you uncheck this one you can see how it disappears there from the list.
So all you need to do to use the Thesaurus is select it here at the top and then type
a word. You'll be looking it up just as if you were using a paper book. You can see the
information here. You can even click on any of these to jump around to another entry in
the Thesaurus. You can go to the Dictionary for any entry that you have up on the screen. So you
can switch back and forth between the two of these. So you could actually look something up
with the dictionary and if you decide that's not quite the word you want to use you can
then switch to the Thesaurus and then start going through the words there to find the one you want.
Now there's another way to access the dictionary or thesaurus right from the text that you're
writing. So I'm using, as an example Pages, but it could be composing an email message or something
in Messages or the Notes App or anything. All you need to do is Control Click, right click,
or two-finger click on a trackpad, any word that I want and then choose Look Up. This will,
indeed, look up in the dictionary and create this little window here. But as
long as you have a Thesaurus chosen as one of the options in the Dictionary App it will also
show you that entry there. You can see some quick words that you can use right here or
click More in most cases to expand on it. Sometimes you'll even find a little handy
word took kit at the bottom which will breakdown words in categories to make it even easier to use.
Now a keyboard shortcut for this is to place your pointer in the word that you
want to look up and then do Control Command and then D and it will bring up this window.
How about on the iPhone or iPad. I'll demonstrate here on the iPhone and it works basically the
same on the iPad. Well, there is no app on the iPhone or iPad like there is on the Mac
for directly accessing dictionary definitions and thesaurus entries. But there is still the
same built-in Dictionary and Thesaurus. So you access this in any app, say Pages,
or Mail, or anything. You select the word and then you tap and hold it. Then you look
through the menu here at the top to find Look Up. You bring that up and it will take you to
the entry here and it will show you a dictionary definition and, for most words, not all, it will
show you thesaurus synonyms as well. Now if you don't see this all the time it may be just those
words don't have entries. But you can also check in Settings, under General, and then look for
Dictionary. Then there make sure that you've got the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus selected.
Of course on the iPhone, the iPad, and also on the Mac you can get third party
Dictionary Apps and use those or just go to websites that provide dictionary
and synonym look up as well. So you usually have plenty of other
tools at your disposal as well. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.