🇮🇩 Best Indonesian dictionaries for intermediate learners

KBBI is the authoritative dictionary of Indonesian, maintained by the government language agency, and the online sixth edition is the reference to settle what a word really means, which register it belongs to, and whether it is standard at all. Because it is monolingual it only becomes usable around B1, but from there it beats every bilingual option. You need a free account to search the web version; offline mobile apps exist if you would rather not register.

SEAlang is a university-built lexicography project that pairs a serious Indonesian dictionary with a bitext corpus you can search for how a word is actually used in published writing. For anyone reading real Indonesian — news, literature, official documents — the corpus search answers questions no learner dictionary can. The interface is uncompromisingly academic and looks two decades old, and there is no audio or beginner material.

Sederet is the workhorse English–Indonesian dictionary most learners in Indonesia end up using: fast lookups in both directions, root-word handling that copes with Indonesian's affixes, and example sentences for common words. It is free and needs no account. The site is built for Indonesians learning English, so the surrounding tutorials point the other way and the page is cluttered with ads and unrelated tools.

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.