🇨🇿 Best Czech dictionaries for intermediate learners

Maintained by the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences, this is the authority Czechs themselves consult. Search any word to get its complete declension or conjugation table, and the accompanying articles settle spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and word-formation questions. For a language whose difficulty is concentrated in case endings, having the full paradigm one search away is the highest-value free tool there is. Everything is in Czech, and the explanatory articles assume you already read Czech comfortably.

Lingea's free Czech-language portal bundles a monolingual dictionary, a dictionary of synonyms and the spelling and punctuation rules, so you can check what a word means, find a less repetitive alternative and confirm how to write it without leaving the site. A good companion to the Academy's příručka, which is stronger on paradigms but weaker on meaning. It is entirely in Czech, so it becomes useful somewhere around B1, and Lingea advertises its commercial dictionaries throughout.

Seznam's dictionary is the default bilingual lookup in Czechia, covering Czech against English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Slovak, with audio pronunciation and inflected forms shown for entries. It is quick, free and needs no account, which is what you want for the dozens of lookups a day that early Czech demands. Definitions are terse and it gives little sense of register or collocation, so move to a monolingual dictionary as soon as you can read one.

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.