The main focus of Artha is high usability without compromising simplicity. Once the application is launched, it sits in the system tray. The user can select text on any window, and call Artha by pressing the set hot key combination, which pops up Artha with the word looked-up. If the user wants notifications, rather than the app. popping up, it can be done by enabling notifications, which results in a (balloon tip) notification of the selected word's prime definition from WordNet, from the system tray, when the hot hey is pressed. Regular expressions based search can be a very useful feature when a word is vaguely known (say just the number of characters or it's start and end and so on) and needs to be looked up. The search can me fine-tuned and minimised to a very specific level using regular expression.

Technically, Artha is written in pure C using the GTK+ widget kit & Glib, making it cross-desktop and cross-platform. It uses libnotify for notifications. It may be used as a advanced replacement for WordWeb in GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows environments. Currently different flavours of GNU/Linux and Windows XP (and above) are targeted, but porting to other UNIX-like systems and Mac OS X will commence soon.