🇭🇰 The best dictionaries for learning Cantonese

Pleco's open Cantonese project: it merges the CC-Canto database with CC-CEDICT and Cantonese readings, so you can search by characters, jyutping, Yale or English and get clean English definitions. Everything is free, the data is downloadable, and the same dictionary installs as a free add-on inside the Pleco app for offline lookup on a phone — the usual setup for serious learners. It leans on Mandarin-era CC-CEDICT data for many entries, so for colloquial Cantonese usage check words.hk as well.

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.

A large crowd-built dictionary where entries are defined in Cantonese itself with jyutping, usage examples and English glosses on many words, alongside a corpus of written Cantonese text. Because it documents how people actually speak, it catches slang, particles and internet coinages that older Chinese dictionaries pretend do not exist. The main site is in Chinese; CantoWords.com is the same data with an English interface, which is what most learners should use. Not every entry has an English gloss yet.

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.