📖 English Pop-up Dictionary for Anki

An Anki add-on that shows an instant dictionary popup when you select any English word while reviewing cards — with translation to Brazilian Portuguese, phonetic transcription, audio pronunciation, definitions, and synonyms.

✨ Features

• 🇧🇷 Translation — English → Portuguese (BR) via MyMemory API
• 📖 Definitions — part of speech, meaning, and usage examples
• 🔊 Audio pronunciation — native speaker audio playback
• 📝 Phonetic transcription — IPA notation
• 🔗 Synonym chips — clickable, each one triggers a new lookup
• ⚡ Local cache — repeated lookups are instant and work offline
• 🌙 Dark mode — adapts automatically to Anki's night mode
• 🖱️ Right-click menu — "Look up in English Dictionary..." when text is selected
• 🔍 Works in Previewer — not just the reviewer

🚀 How It Works

Select any English word or phrase on your card (double-click or drag) and a popup appears near your cursor.

Card text → user selects a word → JS sends pycmd → Python fetches API + cache → HTML returned → popup rendered

The add-on hooks into Anki's reviewer via webview_will_set_content and webview_did_receive_js_message, injecting CSS/JS into every review session and listening for lookup requests from the frontend.

📦 Installation

From AnkiWeb

The easiest way to install is directly through Anki using the add-on code:

1. Open Anki and go to Tools → Add-ons (or press Ctrl+Shift+A).
2. Click on Get Add-ons...
3. Paste the following code and click OK:

   1095453310
   

4. Restart Anki to activate the add-on.

Alternatively, you can view the official add-on page on AnkiWeb.

Manual

1. Clone or download this repository
2. Copy the folder into your Anki add-ons directory:
   • Windows: %APPDATA%\Anki2\addons21\
   • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2/addons21/
   • Linux: ~/.local/share/Anki2/addons21/
3. Restart Anki

🗂️ Project Structure

quickdict-english/
├── __init__.py           # Entry point — wires up web and reviewer hooks
├── dictionary.py         # Orchestrates cache, APIs, and HTML generation
├── reviewer.py           # Hooks into Anki's reviewer (JS ↔ Python bridge)
├── web.py                # Registers web assets and injects them into Anki
├── cache.json            # Auto-generated local cache (up to 500 entries)
│
├── core/
│   ├── api.py            # Fetches data from Free Dictionary API and MyMemory
│   ├── cache_mgr.py      # Thread-safe local disk cache management
│   └── html_builder.py   # Builds the tooltip HTML from API data
│
└── web/
    ├── css/
    │   ├── tokens.css    # Design tokens (colors, spacing, typography)
    │   ├── layout.css    # Tooltip shell and structural layout
    │   └── components.css# All UI components (buttons, chips, states)
    └── js/
        ├── ui.js         # Tooltip rendering, positioning, and interactions
        └── events.js     # Mouse event handling and pycmd bridge

🔌 APIs Used

No API key or account required.

⚙️ Configuration

There are no settings UI yet. You can tweak constants directly in the source:

🏗️ Architecture Notes

• Parallel fetching — dictionary and translation requests are fired concurrently via ThreadPoolExecutor
• Cache-first — every lookup checks the local cache before hitting the network
• Thread-safe cache — writes are protected by a threading.Lock
• LRU eviction — when the cache exceeds CACHE_MAX, the oldest entries (by timestamp) are removed
• No external dependencies — uses only Python's standard library and Anki's bundled Qt

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

Some ideas for future improvements:

• Settings UI (target language, max definitions)
• Support for other translation languages
• Morphological normalization (look up base form of conjugated verbs)
• Anki card creation from popup

📜 License

This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). In short: you’re free to use, study, and modify this code—but if you run it as a service or distribute modified versions, you must make your source available under the same license.

I’ve put a lot of time into designing and maintaining this work. Please respect the license and my effort:

• You may use this project commercially, but any modifications or services using it must also be open source under the same license.
• If you build on it, please provide proper attribution.

Copyright (C) 2026 Paulo Vitor Silva Soares

This is QuicKDict English

If you find this add-on useful, consider supporting its development:

<a href="https://buymeacoffee.com/pvss"> <img src="https://cdn.buymeacoffee.com/buttons/v2/default-yellow.png" width="200"> </a>