Firefox keyword search: bookmark method

Last updated: July 4th, 2025

Table of contents

Introduction

Many people use a search engine to navigate the Internet, but not everyone knows about Firefox keyword search. This feature lets you assign keywords to bookmarks so that you can query virtually any site with ease.^(note 1) Read on to learn how to set it up.

Why use bookmark keywords?

Smart keywords (Mozilla’s term for this feature) can be a useful tool for several reasons.

Defining a keyword for Wiktionary

Let’s use Wiktionary, the multilingual dictionary as an example.

Open up Firefox and navigate to www.wiktionary.org. Right click Wiktionary’s search bar to pull up a context menu with several entries. Left click the “Add a Keyword for this Search…” entry.

Inside a context menu, the "Add a Keyword for this Search…" entry shows as highlighted.

Firefox now presents a dialog box with three options.

  1. The name of the bookmark.
  2. The location to save the bookmark in.
  3. The keyword to use for the bookmark.

Choose a name and location if you like. Then, type in your desired keyword and click “Save” to add it. I chose wkt.

A dialog box that asks for the name of the bookmark, the folder to save it in, and the keyword.

Test it out: search Wiktionary for definitions

Now you can use keyword search to find the definition of a word. Type wkt (or whatever you chose) into Firefox’s address bar, followed by the word you want to know the meaning of.

Here’s an exercise: what’s the difference between “somnambulism” and “funambulism?”

What else can you do?

You can edit your regular bookmarks in the same way to navigate to any site in a couple of keystrokes. Note that because there’s no query to make, you only type in the keyword itself.

  1. Pretty much anything based on Firefox can add keywords to bookmarks as well. This includes Tor Browser. ↩ (go back)