Modern MacBooks feature “Force Touch” trackpads that can detect how hard you are pressing down. By default, Apple assigns a “Look Up & Data detectors” gesture to a heavy press. If you highlight a word on a webpage and press down hard with one finger until the trackpad clicks a second time, a small dictionary definition or Wikipedia summary will pop up on the screen.
While useful for students or writers, this gesture is incredibly annoying for users who simply type with a heavy hand. If you tend to press down firmly when clicking and dragging text, you will constantly trigger the dictionary pop-up by accident, obscuring the text you were trying to read. You can easily disable this specific Force Click gesture.
How to Disable the Look Up Trackpad Gesture
You can turn off the dictionary pop-up directly from the macOS Trackpad settings.
- Click the Apple Logo in the top-left corner of your Mac’s screen.
- Select System Settings (or System Preferences on older macOS versions).
- Scroll down the left-hand navigation sidebar and click on Trackpad.
- In the main window on the right, ensure you are on the Point & Click tab.
- Look for the item labelled Look up & data detectors.
- By default, this is set to “Force Click with one finger.” Click the toggle switch next to it to turn it Off. (On older macOS versions, simply uncheck the box).
The change applies instantly. You can now press down on your trackpad as hard as you want when highlighting text; macOS will treat it as a standard click and will never again spawn an unwanted dictionary pop-up.