Dictionary and Thesaurus

Pages 8.0 does not have its own dictionary and thesaurus. If you perform word lookups, it queries the Apple dictionary application , provided you have the proper dictionary and companion thesaurus selected, and ordered in the Dictionary app's Preferences. If you decide to tell Pages to learn a word, it will then add the word to a sorted text list of words in your localDictionary file that resides in ~/Library/Spelling folder. It queries this file in the future for known words for spelling purposes.

In your Applications folder will be the Apple Dictionary application. Open it, and in its Preferences there are a bunch of dictionaries and thesaurus entries for U.S. and British english. You can select the pertinent dictionaries and click and drag to order them. Quit the dictionary application.

If you want to look up a word, there are three different approaches:

1. Right-click on the word, and choose Look up "word" from the secondary panel.
2. Hover (but do not click) your cursor over the word, and then press control+command+D.
3. If your input device is an Apple Trackpad, you must enable Look up & data detectors in System Preferences : Trackpad : Point & Click. Then with practice, you can hover over a word, and drop three-fingers simultaneously on the trackpad to achieve the same result as the preceding steps.

In all of the above cases, the result will appear as:

right click on the word.