Best Online Dictionaries: 10 Free Tools

Loie Favre
7 min readAug 11, 2020

I am not going to suggest a machine translation here, because I, like you, am a human translator and content creator that provides rich, contextually-appropriate, personality-filled texts that will meet the needs of my target audiences. I highly suggest that you use machine translations with caution and use an online dictionary for translations to help you in your work, whether it’s for your career, for school or for personal use. Here are some of my top picks.

Choosing the right online dictionary to help you with your translations, school homework or other professional work. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

Linguee

This online translation tool has been with me for a long time. German-based, they are also the creators of DeepL, the AI-driven machine translator, that provides contextually appropriate translations. Linguee offers a large variety of translations per word. In addition, it provides the words or phrases in context; the word is displayed in sentences or paragraphs drawn from different reference websites to show you how it could be used in various situations. You’ve also got Wikipedia on site. Linguee has an app (both Android and iOS), which is ad free and works offline as well.

Side-note: The cool thing about English (or sometimes not so cool) is that you can use one word for many situations, which is not always the case in German or other languages that offer a much broader vocabulary — so it’s best to see the word in context. Linguee is a big help here.

--

--

Loie Favre

I’m a freelance translator, editor and writer, who is passionate about languages and talking about them! https://www.favretranslations.com/