How do I import or find a thesaurus in Scrivener? It’s the one feature that I have to keep going back to Word for. A dictionary would also be nice.
There’s not a built-in dictionary or thesaurus at the moment; it’s a huge undertaking, and while it may be something Lee looks into post 1.0 release, it’s not something likely to happen for a good while, if at all.* (There’s a spell check, of course, but I’m assuming you mean a real dictionary with definitions.) You might try the free WordWeb–that’s one I hear recommended a lot.
Something else I personally do is just to mark words quickly with an annotation when I’m writing, and then go back and check them up later, so I’m not distracted mid-writing trying to find the perfect word or that one that I know I mean but is escaping me at the moment. I find, for myself, that I have a much easier time of it if I just write the closest word I can come up with, or even just bang out in the annotation “that word that starts with e that means something like blah” and keep writing, then return later when I have time to flip through a dictionary or thesaurus or my brain is just fresher and able to produce that word I was thinking of. All of which is only tangentially related to the dictionary/thesaurus, but I mention it because it helps a lot to maintain your focus since you do have to switch between applications.
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- This isn’t to say a plug-in will never happen; I just don’t want to get too many hopes up since I have no idea when it would happen or how difficult it would be for Lee to implement, and he has a lot of other stuff already on his plate.[/size]