MacOS – How to place Dictionary definitions higher up in spotlight results

dictionarymacosspotlight

I used to use spotlight fairly frequently to quickly look up words in a dictionary. With Lion, I've noticed that my dictionary results have dropped down much lower in the list of results:

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I'd like to bump up the priority of these results so they show up near the top of the list. However, looking at the system Spotlight preferences in Lion, I don't see an obvious way to do this:

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How can I make Dictionary.app results show up higher in the list of Spotlight results?

Best Answer

Finally, I found a hack! I wrote a blog post about this which you can find here (in Chinese).

These are the key steps:

  1. Open the file with Xcode:

    ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist

    If you do not have this file, change the order System Preferences → Spotlight which will cause the OS to create it.

  2. Within the orderedItems node, add a Dictionary item as follows: enter image description here

  3. Save the .plist file.

  4. Open System Preferences → Spotlight, you will find a blank entry, this is what we had added above. You can drag it like other entries to change the order as you like.

  5. You are done! Now type a word in spotlight and see what happened.

enter image description here

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