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When I read on my Kindle, I can simply highlight a word to get its definition. When I read a paper book, this doesn't work. I'm looking for an app on my phone that allows the following: (1) I ask it for the definition of a word; (2) it speaks the definition to me. This allows me to only minimally interrupt the flow of my reading.

I will note that I've tried Siri, the Merriam-Webster dictionary app, and Google Now. None of these works very well for this (try any of them with the word "turophile").

Some things that are important to me:

  • Should work on both iOS and Android;
  • Ideally accepts lots of esoteric words (like turophile);
  • Ideally is "always on" and can be cued by saying some variant of "define [word]" (like Google's "OK Google");
  • Best would be cheap/free.
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    Tough one. All these apps use voice recognition algorithms based on the likelihood of words appearing in common language, but you want to look up uncommon words. Such an app would need the ability for you to spell the word. – user416 Oct 24 '14 at 7:14
  • Googling just doesn't cut it? – Huey Jun 5 '15 at 10:51
  • Google's voice recognition seems to work fine with obscure words like turophile. Maybe it's gotten better over the years? – mic Jul 22 '16 at 22:53

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