Handpicked Chrome Extensions That Make Reading English Documentation Much Easier

Whether for work or personal projects, reading English documentation is something you absolutely cannot avoid when programming. After many years of programming and trying all kinds of tools, here are the Chrome extensions for English that I still keep using. (I update this article from time to time: if I find something good, I will add it; if I stop using something, I will remove it.)

Table of Contents

Mouse Dictionary

It works offline and is very fast. I also read the creator’s technical article, and it was really interesting, so I recommend checking it out.

I use this when I want help with only specific words, not whole sentences—for example, when I only do not know this one verb, or only want to look up this one noun. From an English-learning perspective, the habit of “trying to understand the sentence itself on your own, while only supplementing individual words” is really good, so this extension is useful in those kinds of cases.

I have bought and installed all of the additional data introduced by the creator. (Even buying all of it is not that expensive, so I can honestly recommend it.)

DeepL

Needless to say, this is the official extension for the amazing site that pretty much everyone uses. It is convenient because you no longer have to open DeepL in a separate tab. I use this one when I want to translate entire sentences. Because it lets you translate without thinking, this is the one to use when you want to prioritize development speed.

(To be honest, it is so convenient that it does not really help with English study.)