🇻🇳 The best dictionaries for learning Vietnamese

A long-standing bilingual dictionary that most learners in Vietnam end up using: bidirectional lookup, example sentences, and specialist technical glossaries alongside the general one. Coverage of everyday and technical vocabulary is better than the learner-oriented apps. The site is ad-heavy and plainly designed, and it gives you glosses rather than usage guidance — check register with a native speaker before deploying an unfamiliar synonym.

A monolingual Vietnamese dictionary with the definitions, senses and example usage that an English gloss flattens, alongside bilingual modes if you need them. VDict tells you a word's English equivalent; this tells you what Vietnamese speakers mean by it, which is the difference between recognising a word and being able to use it. Free and needs no account, but the page is heavily advertised and plainly built. Soha's tratu is the other well-known option and is served over plain HTTP only, which is why this one is listed here instead.

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.