Explain Selected

Explain Selected is a lightweight Chrome extension that removes the friction from looking up unfamiliar words while you read. Instead of opening a dictionary tab and scanning through a dozen senses to find the one that fits, you highlight the word or phrase in place and a purple circle appears. One click gives you the definition, the pronunciation and a plain-language explanation written for that specific context.

The distinguishing feature is contextual disambiguation. English is full of words whose meanings have almost nothing to do with each other — the extension's own example is "pounds", which can mean a unit of weight, a verb describing hitting something, or the British currency. Rather than presenting all three blindly, Explain Selected passes the surrounding sentence to ChatGPT and asks it to infer which sense is actually in play, then retrieves the corresponding Merriam-Webster entry and audio pronunciation. It also handles text that no dictionary covers well, such as current slang and narrow technical terminology.

It is aimed at people who read a lot of English online and want to keep their flow: language learners building vocabulary, professionals working through technical documents, and anyone who keeps encountering words with multiple meanings. Useful selections can be saved to a personal list for later memorization, or shared. Two practical caveats from the listing: extensions do not run in tabs that were already open when you installed it, so refresh those tabs first, and no extension works on Chrome internal pages such as the Chrome Web Store itself.