Hello All,

I am new to this forum, so I am going to provide a brief overview of my Linux experience followed by the question I have alluded to in the subject heading.

I stopped using Windows as my main OS in 2009. I always liked OSX so I learned what it took to get OSX on a PC, and began using it exclusively. While taking a course at university, entitled "An introduction to programming for Physics and Astronomy" in Spring 2011 I started learning how to use Linux. I spent summer 2011 learning more about Linux as I attempted to simulate and construct initial conditions for a spiral galaxy. In Fall 2011 I got involved with a handful of other undergraduates that wanted to apply to compete in a competition. I spent almost all my time trying to figure out High Performance Computing. By June 2012 I was able to set up a computer cluster from a base installation of CentOS manually. Last semester I took a graduate class entitled, "Numerical Methods for Astrophysics". The bottom line is that while I have had an accelerated introduction to the linux OS over the past two years, I still have a great deal to learn.

In OSX 10.8 you can right click on a word to reveal a menu that has "Look up in dictionary" above "copy". This is a feature I find tremendously useful and I would like to find a way to do this in a rhel6.3 distribution (specifically Scientific Linux 6.3). I kind of operate under the assumption that any feature that OSX has, it is likely somebody has implemented a similar feature with linux, its just a matter of finding it, compiling it, and properly installing it, if it is not easily found in the main yum repos.

So does anyone know of a way in linux to make it so I can right click on any word to easily get the definition of it?

Thanks.

I can do this on Firefox using the Dictionary Search extension. I right click on a word in my browser and I have the option of looking it up in a variety of languages. Is this what you mean?
jdk

That would be a function of the specific application /program you are using to read the
document - and whether or not the dictionary functionality exists for that specific
program. I use emacs for editing, and just added dictionary.el to the installation,
which does essentially what you describe -- but that only works in emacs. It might
or might not exist for whatever application you are using or want to use.