This is slightly related to the preceding forum post about the link to online dictionaries. For those of us using Heiseg-type mnemonics, it would be great to have direct lookup of character etymology. Currently I have to look up the word on YellowBridge, and then click-through to another page to get character etymologies. Maybe some of the other dictionaries Skritter links to has etymology on the same page, but this is not explicitly noted in the link.

Thanks for considering this.

I agree. I am not using Heiseg, but I do like to have etymology "at the ready" to help decode a word. Especially when I am trying to remember a word that I have gotten wrong for the nth time. As with learning radicals, I think this is another useful "hook" that pays off more and more over time.

Cit.:
(referring to a slightly different feature request)

Link: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=22570560

"Yup, those things are all in the cards. We have several sources for character decompositions, and the mnemonics using them will be shared by users (or you can make private notes).

These two features will be totally sweet!"

As development continues, we're getting a bit closer to the character decompositions on the development list. Not there yet, but I'm starting to smell it!

Perhaps in the meantime, a second YellowBridge option could be added to the pull-down menu. One YB link could go to the current page, the other to the etymology. IIRC, Skritter defaults to what you chose last time. Presumably this would be an easy stopgap measure.

Plus here:

http://www.internationalscientific.org/CharacterASP/EtymologyHome.aspx

Maybe zhongwen.com if that's not too many choices.

By the way when I select Wikipedia Titles in the combo it gets cut off at "Wikipedia Tit" when it rolls up. That's open to misinterpretation. Maybe make the combo a bit wider?

Haven't hooked up these yet because we haven't made the dictionary lookups capable of picking and saving different preferences for multi-character word vs. single character (YB etymology, Chinese Etymology project, and zhongwen.com are all single-character-only lookups). Haven't found a cross-browser way to link to zhongwen.com characters, either. So they aren't quite as easy stopgaps as one might imagine.

Wikipedia Tit--that's great! I will enlargify a bit.