Best Dictionary Plugins for WordPress
Week 7 Blog Post
For our new site SEOQ.com (come visit us here!) made on WordPress we wanted to create a site where SEO professionals and website owners could come together. There are three main components: an educational section, a member directory and seo analysis tool.
In the education section, there is a technical and business track. These educational courses are designed to teach people about SEO. With every type of learning, there is always vocabulary so we needed to create a dictionary.
Here are some of the available FREE dictionary plugins for WordPress:
Explanatory Dictionary (take a look at the one we used SEOQ Dictionary):
15,517 downloads, 4.5/5 given 37 ratings
This is a very simple to use and generic dictionary. By inserting its shortcode onto a page, you can create your own dictionary page. The page will have the alphabet on top and then a list of all the terms automatically alphabetized. The plugin itself allows you to add and edit entries easily.
What’s Nice:
- It automatically looks through all your WordPress content and for words that you have defined, it allows users to hover over the word and see the definition without having to go to a dictionary page. The defined words are in a different color (subject to customization).
- When you define the word, you can select synonyms or alternative spellings and the plugin will all identify them as the same thing.
- You can choose how many times you want a certain word to be defined on a page
What’s Annoying:
- It is case sensitive. For example: Crawling and crawling are two different words. This could be fixed.
- There’s no search function. There is the alphabet bar but some of us do get a bit lazy scrolling.
- While you can exclude certain pages from having terms defined, you can’t get rid of a complete section (say I want only education posts to be defined but not generic blog posts). You would have to manually type in all the pages to be excluded.
Encyclopedia / Lexicon / Glossary / Wiki / Dictionary / Knowledge base
5,447 downloads 3.5/5 given 17 ratings
Although it is advertised to be a dictionary too, this is definitely more of a encyclopedia plugin. I have not used it, but based on screenshots: it allows you to create entries and link related entries together. It also allows for taxonomies and taxonomies cloud. This seems to be more appropriate for someone hoping to create a full blown encyclopedia than a simple dictionary plugin.
Terms and Definitions Dictionary
1,870 downloads, 5/5 given 7 ratings
This is similar to our plugin. “It defines a new post type, Definitions, and its own taxonomy, Families (of Terms and Definitions).” However it seem to be a lot more hassle. From the plugin “For adding a definition to your post, first, you must create the definition in the Definitions section. After that, go to your post, and write “[def]Term[/def]”, where Term is the title of your definition (or the slug, or the ID, if you have configured the plugin that way).”
Note: not tested for compatibility with latest WordPress version (3.9.1).
Quick English Dictionary Meaning
551 downloads, 5/5 given 1 rating
“BeeDictionary.com creates a small temporary popup for difficult and confusing words. A reader can check the meaning without opening a dictionary or going to other sites.” This is not relevant for us since we are defining terms-of-art and technical jargon. But for those who just need a normal English dictionary, this could work.
Note: hasn’t been tested for the latest WordPress version (3.9.1).
