🇩🇪 Best German dictionaries for advanced learners

Nearly 40,000 volunteer contributors have made this the go-to German-English dictionary for exactly the phrases Google Translate mangles — compounds, idioms, technical terms, Austrian and Swiss variants. Every entry shows gender, plural and usage tags, and there's an offline mobile app. Free; the crowdsourced nature occasionally shows in odd or unverified entries, so cross-check anything surprising.

LEO's real advantage over dict.cc is the discussion forum attached to entries: for any ambiguous word there's usually a thread where native speakers argue out the nuance, which is often more useful than the entry itself. Includes conjugation and declension tables and audio pronunciation. Free and ad-supported, with an interface that hasn't changed much 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.

Duden is what settles arguments about German spelling and grammar, and the online dictionary gives you definitions in German with declension tables, register labels, synonyms and etymology. Switching to it from a bilingual dictionary is a real milestone around B1. Core lookup is free; the Duden-Mentor writing corrector and some premium content are paid.

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.