Their purpose of a dictionary for anyone but tourists should always be to help you learn a language, rather than to replace the learning process with instant translations.
If you want to start thinking in that language, then you should aim to learn the language via that language asap, and monolingual dictionaries are a great way to do that. Now, keep in mind that I would highly recommend you don't rely too much on bilingual dictionaries!! They can make us lazily just accept translations rather than truly try to understand a phrase and its component words, through context. Bilingual (and monolingual) dictionaries: As with the free-resources post, I will strive to keep this post as updated as possible, so I will list just a few at first and then hope that your comments can help me expand this list to make it a nice go to dictionary.Īlso keep in mind that you can use many of these online dictionaries in conjunction with Learning With Texts for quick access to translations while you read.
DICTIONARY MONOLINGUAL OXFORD FREE
Having said that, in this post, I want to list as many free dictionary websites that cater better to specific languages. Finally, I like to use Google Image search to give myself a visual understanding of the word, without relying on translations. Otherwise, look it up in the Wikipedia specific to that language and see its English or other translation on that page. This is obviously better for proper names, or specific items (not verbs etc.). Google Translate seems to be the easiest one to use for less common languages, although I welcome alternatives below!Īs well as these, I highly recommend using Wikipedia to search for the word in English and see a possible translation in the left. It is also good for looking up conjugations of verbs in these languages if you are not sure. I am a big fan of Wordreference for major European languages, especially French, Spanish, and Italian, since I generally find what I'm looking for there, either within their dictionary, or from the forum questions that come up in dictionary searches. (In the comments, I got suggestions for other great multilingual dictionaries: The Free Dictionary, which is a monolingual dictionary in multiple languages! Just click the flags on the left, and Linguee for a bilingual dictionary that gives you the words in context rather than just translations or definitions, and is good for several languages). Some of these can actually be good dictionaries for specific languages, and as good as, or better than many dedicated specific language dictionaries. Wordreference, Bab.la, Google Translate for wide-ranges of languages covered for general terms and Proz term search, the Interactive Terminology for Europe and Mymemory for technical vocabulary.
When discussing the top free resources for language learning, I wanted to give tools that weren't language specific, and as such I included the following multilingual dictionaries first: It's the 21st century, so lets embrace all the free online dictionaries available to us! Throw away your dusty old dead tree dictionaries! They are either too bulky (and expensive) to use conveniently, and not updated regularly enough, or they are too small to cover all the words you might need. They also offer a thesaurus, a medical dictionary, a sports dictionary and a geographical dictionary.Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. is an American publisher that mainly publishes dictionaries. Therefore, every aspect of an entry was handled by a different editor using different formulas or templates They include clear explanations on the grammar, with examples of how it is used in written and spoken English.Ĭollins Dictionary was the first British English dictionary made from the information output by a computer database. It collects all known uses and forms of each word in all variants of the language.Ĭambridge University Press has been publishing dictionaries for English learners since 1995. The Oxford dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, is considered the most comprehensive in the English language.
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