Monday 3 September 2012

English Dictionaries

Free Online English Dictionaries 

Hello and welcome to my blog! I have found several different online dictionaries and I would like to share my  thoughts about them with you. Some of these dictionaries here are monolingual, while other are bilingual.
In monolingual English dictionaries we can only find word explanations, while in bilingual dictionaries we can both word translations and word definitions. Bilingual means "two- languaged". In this text I will talk about a few bilingual and monolingual dictionarieas that can be found on the internet. That's right, online dictionaries. 

Cambridge Online Distionaryhttp://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Cambridge Online Dictionary is the most popular dictionary on the internet. It is both monolingual and bilingual and it has word definitions for British English, American English, Learner's English, Business English, Essential British English and Essential American English. This dictionary has also three different combinations of tranlation. The language combinations are English - Turkish, English - Spanish and Spanish - English.

TheFreeDIctionary (by Farlex): http://www.thefreedictionary.com/
This is a monolingual dictionary that has everything you need! The English monolingual dictionary has the standard word definition dictionary, a medical dictionary where you can get explanations to word such as acne and paradox, it has a legal dictionary and a financial dictionary. Besides all this, TheFreeDictionary also has an dictionary where you can get your acronyms and idioms answered. The reason why I like this particular dictionary so much is because when you want to search, you can choose to search a word that starts with "eng" or ends with "lish", for example. Another thing that I find very interesting with this dictionary is that when you search for a country, you get very short but precise information about the specific country.

Merriam - Webster: http://www.merriam-webster.com/
Merriam - Webster is a very good dictionary as well as the two above. It is both bilingual and monolingual and has also a thesaurus - a synonym dictionary. There is only one opportunity when it comes to language translation, and that is from Spanish to English dictionary. Even though Spnish is one of the most spoken languages on Earth, I think there should be more opportunities to choose between. Like French to English, for instance. Otherwise this is a very good online dictionary with a medical dictionary and an encyclopedia as well.

In my opinion, the Cambridge Online Dictionary is the winner here. I like it because it is so simple, but still gives a full explanation to many words. Another reason why I like the Cambridge Online Dictionary is because of its design. I would recomend this dictionary to everyone who like simple dictionaries, but for you people who like something more advanced, I would recomend TheFreeDictionary because it has almost EVERYTHING an online dictionary should have. Cheers!