Privacy Policy — Word Meaning

The text you highlight is sent to a third party

Word Meaning looks words up by asking an outside dictionary service. Whenever you highlight a short piece of text, that text is sent over HTTPS to api.dictionaryapi.dev — a free public API operated by someone else, not by the developer of this extension. Nothing else about the page goes with it, nothing is stored anywhere, and nothing is sent to the developer. But the words you select do leave your device, so do not highlight text you would not want to send to a stranger's server. Details are in Third-party services below.

What this extension does

Word Meaning shows you what a word means without making you leave the page. Select a word — or a short phrase of up to four words — and a small tooltip appears next to your selection with the word's pronunciation, its parts of speech, and a couple of definitions and example sentences for each. Press Escape, scroll, or click anywhere outside the tooltip and it disappears.

The extension has no popup, no options page, and no settings. The tooltip is the entire interface. There is no account, no sign-in, no API key, and no server operated by the developer.

Selections are deliberately limited: if what you highlighted is longer than 60 characters or more than four words, the extension ignores it completely and sends nothing. Highlighting a paragraph to copy it does not trigger a lookup.

Why it runs on every website

You could want the meaning of a word on any page — a news article, a recipe, a documentation site, a local HTML file you opened from your own computer. Because the extension cannot know in advance where you will want that, a small listener has to already be present on the page at the moment you make a selection. That is why the extension declares a content script for all sites.

What that listener actually does is narrow. It waits for a mouse-up or a double-click, then looks at one thing: the text you have selected. If there is no selection, or the selection is too long, it does nothing at all. It does not read the rest of the page, does not look at the page's address, does not watch what you type, and does not run any code in the background while you are simply reading.

The same listener is loaded inside embedded frames on a page, so that highlighting a word in an embedded article or widget works the same way as highlighting one in the main document.

Data the extension collects and stores

None. The extension has no storage permission — it does not request one — so it has nowhere to write anything even in principle.

Concretely, this means:

Definitions are not cached. Looking up the same word twice performs the lookup twice.
There is no history and no saved-words list. The words you have looked up are not recorded anywhere, not even on your own device.
The selected text and the returned definition exist only in the memory of the page you are on, for as long as the tooltip is open. Closing the tooltip or leaving the page discards them.

What is NOT sent

No page content beyond your selection. Only the few words you highlighted are transmitted — never the surrounding text, the article body, or anything else on the page.
No page addresses. The URL of the page you are on is not read and not sent. No browsing history is collected.
No identifiers. No name, email address, account, user ID, device ID, or installation ID. The extension does not create one, and does not attach one to the lookup.
No analytics, telemetry, crash reporting, advertising, or tracking of any kind.
No data to the developer. There is no developer-operated backend. The extension can only reach one address on the internet, and it is not one the developer runs.

Where your data is stored

Nowhere. The extension writes nothing to chrome.storage, to cookies, to localStorage, or to any file. It has no storage permission at all.

Permissions and why each one is needed

The extension requests no Chrome API permissions whatsoever — the permissions list is absent from its manifest. No storage, no tabs, no activeTab, no scripting, no clipboard, no history, no bookmarks. The only two things it declares are one network destination and one content script.

Declared	Why it is needed
`https://api.dictionaryapi.dev/*` (host permission)	Allows the extension to request a definition from exactly one address: `https://api.dictionaryapi.dev/api/v2/entries/en/<word>`. This is the only network destination the extension is able to reach. It cannot contact any other server, including any server belonging to the developer.
Content script on `<all_urls>` and `file:///*`	Places the text-selection listener on the pages where you might want to look a word up — any website, and local files you open in Chrome. It runs after the page has finished loading, and inside embedded frames, so a selection anywhere on the page is noticed. It reads only your current selection, and only when you make one. See Why it runs on every website.

Note that access to local file:// pages is off by default in Chrome. It only works if you turn on "Allow access to file URLs" for this extension yourself, on the chrome://extensions page.

Third-party services: dictionaryapi.dev

When you highlight a qualifying selection, the extension makes a single HTTPS GET request to:

https://api.dictionaryapi.dev/api/v2/entries/en/<the text you selected>

The selected text is the only thing that request carries. There is no request body, no API key, no authentication, and no identifier added by the extension.

Please read this part carefully

dictionaryapi.dev is an independent free service. The developer of this extension does not own it, does not operate it, has no agreement or contract with the people who run it, and has no control over what they do with the requests they receive. Like any web server, it can see the word you looked up along with the ordinary technical details every HTTPS request exposes, such as your IP address. It may log that, and the developer cannot promise otherwise, cannot delete anything on your behalf, and cannot make commitments about its uptime, accuracy, or retention practices.

The practical consequence: treat every word you highlight as something you are publishing to an outside server. Do not highlight names, passwords, account numbers, medical terms you would rather keep private, or anything else sensitive — on webmail, banking pages, medical portals, internal company documents, or anywhere else. If you want to read such a page with no lookups happening at all, disable the extension for that session on chrome://extensions.

Once a request reaches dictionaryapi.dev, what happens to it is governed by that service's own terms, not by this policy. Its site is at dictionaryapi.dev.

No other third party receives any data. There are no other network requests of any kind.

Data retention and how to delete your data

There is nothing to delete. The extension stores no data, so there is no history to clear, no cache to empty, and no export or deletion request to make of the developer.
Uninstalling removes the extension and its content script; no leftovers remain, because nothing was ever written.
Lookups already sent to dictionaryapi.dev are outside the developer's reach. Any retention question about them has to go to that service's operators.

Children's privacy

This extension is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from children. It collects and stores no personal information from anyone.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted on this page and the "Last updated" date at the top will change. Material changes — in particular any change to what is sent off the device, or to which service receives it — will be reflected here before the corresponding extension update is published.

Contact

Questions, concerns or data requests: aqahramonov2007@gmail.com

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