Von Nau

Fix broken dictionary hotkey

Tuesday October 11, 2011

On a Mac, when you hover your mouse over a word and press CTRL – CMD – D, it will bring up a little box with the definition of the word. I love this feature so much. A few months ago, it stopped working for me. I finally found a fix.

  1. From the Finder’s Go menu, choose Utilities.
  2. Open Terminal (located in the Utilities folder, in the Applications folder).
  3. Carefully type (or paste) the following command, then press Return.
    sudo rm /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.IntlDataCache*
  4. Enter your admin password if prompted for it.
  5. Type or paste the following command in Terminal, then press Return.
    sudo rm /var/folders/*/*/-Caches-/com.apple.IntlDataCache*
  6. Quit Terminal.
  7. Restart the computer.

These instructions are copied from an article in Apple’s KB. It’s posted as the solution to a different issue, but it also fixes the hotkey problem.

Thanks to Jose Paulson on the Apple Discussion Boards for figuring this out.