🇵🇹 Best Portuguese dictionaries for beginners

Fast, free and comprehensive, with full conjugation for every verb, etymologies, and an explicit switch between the Portuguese and Brazilian orthographic conventions — which is exactly what you need when the same word is spelled differently on each side of the Atlantic. Definitions are in Portuguese only, so it becomes useful around B1. This is the dictionary most Portuguese speakers actually open.

Published by Melhoramentos, with over 350,000 definitions including regionalisms, colloquialisms and slang, plus Portuguese–English and other bilingual dictionaries alongside the monolingual one. It is the Brazilian counterpart to Priberam and the better choice when a word is Brazil-specific. The web version is free; the site is ad-heavy and the mobile apps are paid.

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.

The digital home of Portugal's biggest reference publisher: the Portuguese-language dictionary plus Portuguese–English and other bilingual pairs, verb conjugation, and native audio for headwords, all from a European Portuguese perspective. The core dictionary lookups are free; some encyclopaedic content sits behind a subscription. Between this and Priberam you have European Portuguese lexical questions covered without paying anything.