Like many people I love reading. I enjoy all kinds of stories. The one thing that I really enjoy though is the physical book itself. I don’t think you can beat it, but, sometimes when you read some books you might struggle with some of the vocabulary that they use.

I’m a great believer in writing simply, but even the best of authors that follow this same principle might use words that you are unfamiliar with. If this happens several times on a page it can increase your frustration levels, and detracts from the story.

This is where technology can help!

The Kindle device, the Kindle app, and Apple Books app all have the ability to look definitions of words up for you. All at the tap of a button. Here it is on the Kindle app on my iPad.

The first time you use the feature it downloads a dictionary. After that you can get definitions even when you don’t have an internet connection. As you can see from the screenshot you can get additional information using the links in blue.

It’s similar in Apple Books:

Apple do a more encompassing search of absolutely everything (for some reason). If you don’t have an active internet connection then only get the dictionary definition (which makes sense, because your device can’t look up those things on the internet without an active connection).

There is actually a lot more than you can do in both of the apps, and on the Kindle itself, but more on that another time.