James Somers’ You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014) changed my life for the better.

https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage is a phenomenal resource as well.

I've switched completely to Wiktionary for the dictionary and etymology part of that. It's obviously not perfect, but neither was Google for that matter. For the thesaurus part, whatever the first result on DuckDuckGo is is usually enough to knock some sense into my brain so I actually remember the word I want.

It’s insane, and there was even a helpful graph of word usage over time. “define <word>” is still baked into my brain, too, after so many years of use.

Like others have said, Wiktionary is a great resource, and is usually more authoritative. Many times the Google result would say “origin unknown” after listing the route a word in English took through Latin from Greek, while Wiktionary would settle on some PIE construct with links to cognates, etc.

I’ve even replaced the default English dictionary on my Kobo with one derived from Wiktionary, major win.

They could/should bring that back, even within ai mode

I absolutely hate this so much. I type "define" because I'm looking for a dictionary definition. Dictionary authors provide a careful consideration to the fluidity of language, and they write dictionaries in the format they do for a reason. The AI overview comes from web retrieval, which sources definitions from random idiots on the internet. These random idiots will just repeat what I already thought the word meant, offer up a common misconception or etymological fallacy, or give the 'annoying grammar nazi' take.

Yes, I hate this. The old knowledge panel was way better.

I would not be surprised if this particular one is a means to inflate token processing numbers

half the time I'm just using it to make sure I have the spelling correct, but if I'm too off, I get some random Ai slop back rather than the most likely word I mispelled