Old Occupation Name Explainer

WHAT IT DOES This userscript scans every webpage you visit for over 70 archaic and historical occupational terms—words like "chandler" (candle maker), "cooper" (barrel maker), "farrier" (horseshoer), "scrivener" (copyist), and "wainwright" (wagon builder). When it finds one, it highlights the term with a subtle blue underline and makes it interactive. Hover over or click the term (depending on your preference) and a clean tooltip appears with a clear, modern definition. No more guessing what a "cordwainer" or "yeoman" was—the explanation is right there on the page. WHERE IT RUNS The script works on every website you visit—genealogy pages, historical articles, old literature, census records, museum exhibits, or any text-heavy page. It runs entirely within your browser, reading only the visible text content of the current page. It does not track your browsing history, access other tabs, or send any data anywhere. All definitions are stored locally within the script. HOW TO USE After installation, open the panel by clicking the tool's icon in the BotGentz sidebar. The panel shows two settings: choose whether you want terms to trigger on hover or click, and toggle auto-scan on page load (enabled by default). Click "Scan and annotate page" to manually trigger a scan at any time. Once scanned, any known occupation term on the page becomes highlighted. Hover or click to see the definition. If you want to remove all annotations and return the page to its original state, click "Clear annotations". THE TECHNICAL MECHANISM This script uses a TreeWalker to traverse every text node in the document's DOM, filtering out script, style, SVG, and form input elements to avoid interference. For each text node, it applies a case-insensitive regular expression built from a sorted dictionary of occupation terms—sorted by length descending so longer terms like "whitesmith" are matched before shorter substrings like "smith". When a match is found, the script replaces the original text node with a document fragment containing the surrounding text and a styled element for the matched term. This preserves the original text while adding interactive behavior. Event listeners are attached to each span: for hover mode, mouseenter shows a positioned tooltip and mouseleave hides it; for click mode, a click toggles the tooltip, and a document-level click handler closes it when clicking outside. Tooltips are absolutely positioned based on the term's bounding rectangle, ensuring they appear directly above or below the highlighted word without pushing page layout. THE PANEL The panel is draggable anywhere on the screen and remembers its position between sessions. It can be collapsed to a small floating bubble to minimize distraction, and expanded again with a single click. The panel's width can be adjusted, and pressing the Escape key closes it instantly. All settings—your chosen trigger method and auto-scan preference—are persisted locally using GM_setValue, so your preferences remain intact across page reloads and browser restarts. PLEASE NOTE This userscript requires the free BotGentz extension to function. The script relies on a built-in dictionary of approximately 70 occupation names; it does not contact any external APIs or servers for definitions. Websites change their structure over time, so the script's ability to detect terms depends on how content is presented—it works best with plain text and may not detect terms inside complex dynamic widgets, canvas-rendered content, or heavily obfuscated JavaScript-generated text. No data from your browsing is stored or transmitted anywhere.