this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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Well, have you ever read something and went "what the hell is this?", "I don't get this", "what is an abubemaneton?". Well, now you'll be able to quickly ask AI about it.
I would always prefer a dictionary or a Wikipedia over a fucking LLM.
But you can't always use a dictionary to understand the use of words or phrases in novel contexts. For instance, maybe a phrase contains meaning not in its literal text, but in its resemblance to a quotation from another work, or to a previous quotation within the same work.
I've taken a classic Swedish poem ("Bron" by Erik Lindorm), and I can't seem to find an explanation of what it means via traditional searching. But when I paste it into ChatGPT and ask what it means, it gives a detailed interpretation.
A human could do the same, but it's unreasonable to expect every learner has a human on standby to cater to their every educational whim at all hours of the day.
LLMs will tell you anything, and if you can't fact check it, you will never know if it's true or not.
If you're fine with believing in random words put together nicely, I can't stop you, but I won't cheer you on, either.
LLMentalist
Your own reference explains how the AI responses are more than just random words put together nicely, and I can and have fact-checked it. It's not a trustworthy tool for many things, but it is useful for language-based pursuits, because language is precisely what it's designed to work with.
For example, I've recently been watching a Chinese period drama and asked ChatGPT what various words were by transcribing how I heard them and explaining the context. It gave me accurate hanzi, pinyin, and definitions as confirmed by dictionary sites. It's been a very valuable tool to me for language learning.
It's a token-based model. Not exactly language.
I'm happy that you feel like it's helping you.
But never trust it.
And then the AI can give you some made up and incorrect answer. Hooray!
I remember having an Oxford Dictionary CD as a child (got it with the physical copy).
Unfortunately, it stopped working long ago (and I didn't rip it), but while it did work, I had quite a lot of fun reading up on word-origins, synonyms/antonyms, pronunciations and whatnot.
I'd honestly rather be able to connect something like that to Calibre (and other programs) with DBus, rather than use AI for a definition. And that was just a single CD (I can be sure, because I didn't have a DVD reader).
So, perhaps some other use case?
AI is not only capable of definitions. In fact... You wouldn't use it for that. But It's terribly good at context. So it can interpret a whole phrase, or paragraph. Maybe calibre even passes the book metadata so it can infer characters, places and broader context.
Yeah, that won't really be doable just by an extended dictionary.
I myself tend to use Google sometimes, to look for stuff like "one word for the phrase ..." and most of the times the AI is the one giving the answer.
QuickDic's default databases are compiled from Wiktionary entries, and Wiktionary seems like the most reliable part of Wikipedia currently. Wonder then if that couldn't be used also. On QuickDic, having all databases installed takes a bit over 1 GB, not much for desktop standards afaik.
Sure, I guess, but I could just as easily ask chatgpt in the chatgpt app, I feel.
This just makes it faster, and convenient, you don't have to get out of your book.