🇳🇱 The best dictionaries for learning Dutch

The Taalunie's official word list, the online edition of the Groene Boekje, giving the sanctioned spelling, plural, diminutive and verb forms for well over a hundred thousand words. This is the arbiter when you cannot decide whether a compound takes a hyphen or how a borrowed verb conjugates. Free, and shared as the standard for both the Netherlands and Flanders. It settles spelling only — it gives no definitions, so pair it with a real dictionary.

Van Dale has been the reference Dutch dictionary since 1874 and remains the one Dutch editors and teachers actually cite. Note the change that catches people out: the free online dictionary was withdrawn on 10 December 2025 and everything now sits behind Van Dale Online. There is a learner-priced tier, Van Dale Online NT2, at about €4.99 a year, with the professional plan nearer €7.50 a month. Only worth paying for if you need bilingual depth or write Dutch professionally — otherwise woorden.org and the ANW cover most needs free.

A free Dutch learner's dictionary with clearly written definitions, synonyms, pronunciation and example sentences, plus a good section on idioms and sayings. Since Van Dale withdrew its free online dictionary at the end of 2025 this has become the practical default for looking up a Dutch word in Dutch. It is ad-free and searchable by word fragments. The definitions come largely from Kernerman rather than a Dutch academic corpus, so for fine shades of meaning check the ANW too.

The Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal's dictionary of Dutch since 1970, built on a purpose-made corpus of over 100 million words and covering the Netherlands, Flanders, Suriname and the Caribbean. Entries carry real usage evidence, combinations and register labels — the detail you want once you are writing Dutch rather than just reading it. Free and updated daily, with no printed parent edition. It is a research dictionary, so entries are dense and coverage is still incomplete.

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.