🇧🇩 The best dictionaries for learning Bengali

Bidirectional English–Bangla lookup with example sentences, plus grammar notes and appendices. It is aimed at Bengali speakers learning English, which makes it unusually good in the direction learners of Bengali need least — but the Bangla-to-English side is quick and the coverage of common words is better than the academic dictionaries. The interface is dated and ad-supported.

Sailendra Biswas's Samsad is the reference Bengali–English dictionary, digitised by the University of Chicago's Digital South Asia Library. Search in Bengali script or transliteration. It is a scholarly dictionary rather than a phrasebook, so definitions are precise and occasionally literary — for everyday usage a learner dictionary will feel friendlier, but nothing else has this coverage for free.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.