🇵🇭 Best Filipino dictionaries for beginners

One of the oldest Tagalog sites still standing, with short explanations of words, phrases, pronunciation and grammar points alongside pages on Filipino food, music, literature and idioms. Its stated aim is helping foreigners talk to ordinary Filipinos, so it covers the Taglish and slang that formal courses skip. It is a browsable reference rather than a course — there is no sequencing, and some pages have not been touched in years.

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.

This is the hub of the Tagalog learning world: a dictionary of roughly 85,000 words with 66,000 native audio clips and 20,000 example sentences showing syllable stress and word-by-word breakdowns, alongside a text reader with click lookups, a daily-updated library of YouTube videos with transcripts, spaced-repetition decks including the well-known 2k frequency deck, and an active learner forum. If you use one Tagalog site, use this one. Much is free with an account, but the deepest dictionary and reader features sit behind a subscription, and the interface is dense rather than elegant.