Nothing brings home to me just how much mileage I habitually rack up on the information highway like a glance at my browser history. Whether it’s showing me locations I visited “last week,” “yesterday,” or even earlier “today,” the amount and the variety of the terrain covered is impressive. Many of the URLs that pop up in my browser history I’d forgotten ever having visited. Sometimes forgetting is good: here at my work computer, for example, history shows that, a few days ago, what started as a purposeful search on Project Gutenberg for literary uses of an unusual word (“tardigrade”) was diverted by one author’s reference to “hoof-shaped shoes” worn by the precursors of policemen in fifteenth-century Florence. Curiosity must have gotten the better of me, for apparently I made seven stops related to hoof-shaped shoes before getting back on track. Most of the time, however, I wish I hadn’t forgotten where I’d been and had kept more bookmarks and notes. What fruitful trails have I abandoned–or spent precious time rediscovering?
A new feature in Wordsmyth, the dictionary look-up history, is designed to help you remember the paths you’ve taken through the dictionary-thesaurus and the words you’ve investigated for as long as you wish to. Your look-up history keeps track of which words you’ve looked up and when, and makes that information easily accessible to you whenever you visit Wordsmyth. Here’s how it works. When you view a dictionary entry, as shown below, the last few words you’ve looked up will be visible in a box in the top right of the entry (indicated by the blue arrow). When there are more than five words in your look-up history, this box will display a link, “See more,” (indicated by the lower red arrow), which will take you to the full look-up history page. This page is also accessible from the tab menu My Wordsmyth: Look-up History (See the upper red arrow).
On the Look-up history page each word you have looked up is listed in chronological order from newest to oldest. For each word, there is a complete record. n Moving from left to right across the columns, as shown in the image below, you will see 1) the word looked up, 2) the number of times the word was looked up on a given day (#), 3) the date on which it was looked up, 4) the first definition of the word and, in brackets, the number of definitions the word has, if more than one. Finally, 5) the Site column tells you which Wordsmyth site you used (Kids or Main), and, 6) if the Main site was used, the level of the dictionary you used (Beginners, Intermediate, or Advanced).
View alphabetically or by date
To faciliate finding particular words you may have looked up, the look-up history will display alphabetically if you click on the small blue triangle tot he right of the “Word” column heading, and chronologically if you click on the triangle to the right of the “Date” column heading.
When your look-history is extensive, perhaps stretching over a number of pages, you can narrow down the words you see by using the drop down menu “Show words looked up” (a in the image above), choosing to see “all history,” “last 30 days”, last 7 days or 1 day, and clicking “find.” You may also enter a word or a date in the “Find a word or date” search box (b in the image above) and click on “Find” to view the page where a particular word or date appears.
The Look-up History is very alert! It will record not only words you look up using the general search box, but also synonyms, similars, and antonyms you click on, was well as Word Explorer words. However, you can clear your history by clicking on the blue [Clear] link (c). And you can hide the lookup history box in the Display options menu that appears on the entry page.