A hover-to-read Urdu dictionary for Chrome, in the spirit of rikaikun for Japanese. Point at an Urdu word on any page and a tooltip shows its transliteration, English meaning, and dictionary entry.
- Go to
chrome://extensions - Turn on Developer mode (top right)
- Load unpacked → select this folder
| Action | |
|---|---|
| Hover an Urdu word | tooltip with transliteration + meaning |
| C | copy the Urdu word |
| K | full dictionary entry (all senses, Urdu back-translations) |
| Esc | dismiss |
The toolbar popup has an on/off switch, a Hold Shift to look up mode for when you want to read without tooltips constantly appearing, and an Urdu font picker — Nastaliq (default) or Naskh, previewed live in the picker itself.
The font applies to Feham's own tooltip and detail panel; page text is left alone. Both faces are bundled, so nothing is fetched at runtime. Changing it takes effect immediately in open tabs.
Urdu is space-separated, so unlike Japanese there's no segmentation problem —
the word under the cursor is found with caretRangeFromPoint, then expanded to
the surrounding run of Arabic-script characters.
There's no good scrapeable Urdu↔English dictionary online, so lookups go to
Google's public translate_a/single endpoint. It's undocumented and returns a
positional array, but it carries more than a plain translation:
| field | used for |
|---|---|
dt=t |
the machine translation |
dt=bd |
dictionary entries grouped by part of speech, with Urdu back-translations |
dt=rm |
romanization (محبت → muhabbat) |
dt=at |
alternative translations |
The dictionary and alternatives matter more than the raw translation. Bare nouns
come back with a spurious article (کتاب → "The book") and particles come back
transliterated rather than translated (کے → "K"), so pickPrimary() in
background.js prefers the cleaner source: کتاب → book, کے → of the.
| file | |
|---|---|
content.js |
word detection, tooltip, highlight — all UI in a shadow root |
background.js |
lookups, response parsing, caching |
popup.html/js |
settings |
fonts/ |
Noto Nastaliq Urdu + Noto Naskh Arabic, bundled so tooltips render without a network fetch |
Two things worth knowing if you edit this:
Network calls live in the service worker. In MV3 a content script's fetch
is subject to the host page's CSP, so looking a word up directly from
content.js fails on any site with a strict connect-src. The service worker
has the extension's own host permissions, so it always works.
The highlight never touches the page DOM. It's drawn as overlay rectangles
positioned over the word's client rects. Wrapping the word in a <span> (what
the first version did) mutates the page, which breaks React/Vue re-renders and
clobbers the user's own text selection.
Lookups are cached in chrome.storage.local for 30 days, capped at 1000 words,
and in-flight requests are de-duplicated — without that, hovering across a
paragraph will get you rate-limited by Google.
storage only, plus host access to translate.googleapis.com. Nothing is sent
anywhere except the single word you hover — see PRIVACY.md.
store/ holds the Chrome Web Store submission material: screenshots at the
required 1280×800, plus listing.md with the description,
permission justifications and privacy answers ready to paste into the dashboard.
To rebuild the upload package:
zip -r feham-<version>.zip manifest.json background.js content.js \
popup.html popup.js icons fontsstore/ and the zip itself are deliberately left out of the package.
Bundled fonts are Noto Nastaliq Urdu and Noto Naskh Arabic, © The Noto Project Authors, used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 — see fonts/OFL.txt.
