If you often use a website like Wikipedia or Dictionary.com to look up different words, I've got a amazing and little-known shortcut for you. In fact, this can be used to quickly search any site that has a search box, without even going to that site.

If you use Firefox, Opera, or Mozilla as your web browser, you can easily search any website for a word or phrase without having to visit the site. When you are at any website that you use to look up information often, just right-click on the search box. Then choose “Add a Keyword for this Search”. Add a short key word and give it a name. Then when you want to look up a word at that website, you simply enter the keyword that you choose followed by a space followed by the word you want to look up. You will be whisked to the search program or proper page for that website. 

For example, I use Wikipedia quite often. So I went to Wikipedia.com, right-clicked on the search field, and chose “Add a Keyword for this Search” from the drop-down list.  I named the shortcut Wikipedia and entered the letter w for the shortcut.  I let Firefox save it in the Bookmark folder, which was entered by default. I clicked on OK. 

Later, when I was at another website, I wanted to get the Wikipedia entry for hydrogen. So I entered the following in the address bar of my Firefox browser:

w hydrogen

I was taken immediately to the Wikipedia entry for hydrogen. 

Two things to be aware of: 1. This does not work in Internet Explorer, but it works great in Firefox, and 2. Be sure you enter the shortcut that you created and the word you want to look up in the address bar of the browser (where you normally enter a www-type address). If you have a search bar, it is easy to try to put it in the search bar by mistake.

If you haven't yet tried Firefox, you can download it here: 

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