🇬🇧 The best dictionaries for learning English

Built for Bengali speakers learning English: each English word comes with its Bengali meaning, synonyms, antonyms and example sentences. Small (about 5,000 words) compared with a full dictionary, so it suits building a core vocabulary rather than looking up anything you meet. Free, no account. Suggested to us by its makers.

The other great free learner's dictionary, distinguished by pairing every English entry with a translation into your own language — genuinely useful when a monolingual definition leaves you unsure — plus CEFR levels, example sentences, both accents in audio and a good grammar section. It is often quicker than Oxford for a rough sense of a word. Coverage of newer slang lags, the bilingual entries are much thinner than the English ones for smaller languages, and the site is ad-heavy.

Definitions are constrained to a controlled defining vocabulary, so you never need a second dictionary to understand the first one, and each headword carries a CEFR tag telling you whether it is worth learning yet, alongside British and American audio, grammar patterns and collocations. The free site covers the full Advanced Learner's Dictionary. It is monolingual by design, which is right for intermediate learners and off-putting for absolute beginners, and the ads and app upsells on the free site are noticeable.

This is the former Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary under Britannica's roof (learnersdictionary.com now redirects here), and its distinguishing feature is volume of examples — most entries show the word in many real sentences, which teaches usage far better than a definition does. Best for learners of American English who keep producing grammatically correct but unnatural sentences. It is American-only in spelling and idiom, the site is ad-supported, and the rebrand means older bookmarks and links point at the wrong place.

Translations in both directions with the many senses of a word kept apart, and below each entry, forum threads where native speakers answer the questions a dictionary cannot (which preposition, which register, what a phrase really means). Free with no account. The interface is dated and ad-supported.

Written for learners rather than translators: clear definitions, example sentences, and audio and phonetic transcription for both British and American pronunciation, with the interface in Spanish. Free. Less nuance than WordReference on idioms; use the two together.

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.