This page presents you with a number of useful online
dictionaries, spelling and usage guides, glossaries and encyclopedias
in various European languages (partially checked and updated on 26 Feb.
2019).
Keep on coming back to this list as it gets updated
from time to time.
Dutch resources
This site is a real treasury of information about the
Dutch language, language education and language policy in
Dutch-speaking countries. Click on the word "taalunie" above to go to
the site.
Click here
to go to the latest edition of the official spelling guidelines
published in Oct. 2005 (Woordenlijst Nederlandse Taal).
There's a lot of interesting information on this site,
so have a good look around it.
Van
Dale is one of the Netherlands' best-known dictionary publishers. On
their website, you can use an abridged electronic version of their
chunky one-volume dictionary of modern Dutch, Van Dale Hedendaags
Nederlands, and also access various other bilingual dictionaries
featuring Dutch and another European language, from English or French
to Portuguese or Swedish (at no charge). A Dutch-English and an
English-Dutch dictionary are included here.
Click here
to go to the free online dictionaries. Click on the arrow next
to
the language abbreviation in the search box to pick another dictionary
or language pair.
Encyclo is a Dutch encyclopedia with a translation
feature (in various languages) and a spelling check (Taalunie).
Besides searching for specific terms, you can also look
for them alphabetically or using any of Encyclo's 32 categories.
It draws on 715 sources, including online dictionaries
and smaller encyclopedias covering particular fields like art and
history.
French dictionaries
This resource is more than just a simple, monolingual
French dictionary - as well as listing and defining individual terms,
it also includes lexical information (collocations) and grammatical
details (conjugations).
You can look for French synonyms and even get English
translations of the French terms you've just keyed in (and vice versa).
It's a very convenient tool, and it's free to use.
Try out the browser add-ons they offer to make access
even easier.
French dictionary publisher Larousse also has a French
online resource that can be used for free.
This database draws on five of Larousse's French
dictionaries: a large general one along with dictionaries of
synonyms/antonyms, idioms, homonyms and quotations.
Besides this valuable monolingual work, the publisher
also provides various bilingual dictionaries on its website (e.g.
French-English, French-German and French-Arabic) and a
machine-translation tool (which is probably a laugh to use!).
German-English/English-German dictionaries
A useful online dictionary
is available at dict.cc run by
Paul Hemetsberger. This is partly based on the language data used by
BEOLINGUS (see below). The site also includes a translators'
forum for asking and answering users' queries and
there's a free toolbar you can download for your
Web browser.
NB: If you search for a
term here, dict.cc allows you to search other dictionary
websites for the same term (e.g. LEO, BEOLINGUS or PONS,
all of which are listed here, too) or continue your search
in Google or linguistic databases in German.
The Reverso website contains digitised versions of a
wide range of Collins dictionaries. The Collins
German-English Dictionary is a complete and unabridged
version based on the 5th edition from 2004.
 There is another section of the
website called Reverso Context,
which is useful to translators because it displays words and phrases
that you enter in
contexts in which they have already been used as well as presenting
corresponding translations. In short, it's a web-based concordance
program as well as a dictionary. This tool is very similar to Linguee, which uses huge
text
corpora for term searches (see below).
Another bilingual dictionary I often find helful when
searching for appropriate English translations of German words is dictindustry. As the name implies,
it has a lot of technical terms. The dictionary is free to use and also
contains entries in many other European languages.
The translations and
texts contained here are from translations the owner has done and from
databases provided by the Directorate-General for Translation, the
European Commission's in-house translation service.
LEO
is actually a variety of resources that also cover three bilingual
dictionaries: Ger-Eng, Ger-French and Ger-Spanish.
The Ger-Eng/Eng-Ger dictionary
contains a corpus of over 400,000 entries. It can be quite helpful at
times, but in our opinion the dictionary database contains some
surprising gaps in vocabulary.
In my opinion, LEO's main strength actually lies in its
user forum as the expressions users
suggest for inclusion get discussed by other users here, including
native speakers.
If you can't find a term in the dictionary, try any of
the other dictionaries listed on this page, particularly dict.cc.
This free-to-use German-English/Eng-Ger
dictionary maintained by Chemnitz University of Science
and Technology (TU Chemnitz) contains "more than 680,000 translations
with examples and hints, explanations, synonyms, sayings, aphorisms and
quotations."
I occasionally find it a useful supplement to LEO,
especially if you're looking for a technical term, but dict.cc and
Tureng may well prove more
helpful, depending on the subject area in
question. Try it out and see for yourself.
The bilingual online dictionaries
maintained by PONS
(Ernst Klett Verlag) cover a wide range of language pairs, the main
source languages being either German or English. More than 30 different
dictionaries can be accessed here for free, including pictorial ones.
Download their free toolbar for your Web
browser in order to access the dictionaries from any Web page without
having to go to the PONS site first.
Launched in April 2009, newcomer
Linguee.de is a linguistic search engine with a lot of
potential for translators.
Why's that? Well, it doesn't give you a one- or
two-word equivalent of a source word in the target language like a
conventional dictionary does, but presents the source and target term
in an excerpt of a text that has already been translated. The term you
enter is generally marked in bold print and is embedded in a sentence
or paragraph.
It's a bit like looking at a translation database with
the source text on the left and the target text on the right.
In other words, the term or phrase you're looking for
is always presented in a particular context (or several different ones
if enough texts have been fed into the Linguee database beforehand).
This way you can often see which translation fits the bill and which
one doesn't.
Admittedly, Linguee.de doesn't always come up with
exactly the word or phrase you're looking for and it sometimes lists
sentences that haven't been translated correctly, but that's because it
draws on freely available texts of varying quality on the Net.
Used thoughtfully (like any other dictionary, for that
matter), it can nevertheless be a valuable terminological resource for
professional translators. In my own experience, it's frequently come up
with the right term.
An extra benefit Linguee.de has is that it quotes the
source of each text and displays it as a hyperlink, so you can just
click on a potentially interesting one and learn more about the subject
area (and its specific jargon) by jumping to that particular page.
Try it out and see for yourself!
Key EU resources
IATE, or "Interactive
Terminology for Europe", is a huge language resource originally
intended for use by professionals working at or for the European Union.
Made available to the general Internet community in March 2007, it has
succeeded eurodicautom and contains its
entire database.
Like its predecessor, it "covers a broad spectrum of
human knowledge, but is particularly rich in technical and specialised
terminology (agriculture, telecommunications, transport, legislation,
finance) related to EU policy".
EUR-Lex
If you need the official title of an EU law, treaty or
international agreement in English or any of the other EU languages,
then use the EUR-Lex website for your search.
Babylon
This site will probably already be familiar to you.
Babylon offers its users a wide range of bilingual online dictionaries.
Try it out and see what you think.
Amper Translation Service, ATS, reference works,
dictionary, dictionaries, glossary, synonyms, sayings, acronyms,
abbreviations, terminology, translation, bilingual, thesaurus,
encyclopedia, encyclopaedia, Wörterbuch, Glossar, Abkürzungen,
Terminologie, Deutsch, German, English, Danish, dansk, French,
Norwegian, Scandinavian, Dutch, Nederlands, Taalunie, Woordenlijst
Nederlandse Taal, Dutch Language Union, spelling, LEO, BEOLINGUS, PONS,
Reverso, Collins, Duden, Rechtschreibung, Universalwörterbuch, dict.cc,
lexicool, norsk, bokmål, nynorsk, ordbok, Bokmålsordboka,
Nynorskordboka, Oxford University Press, resources, forums, store
norske nettleksikon, Norsk språkråd, newsletter, Wortschatz-Portal,
vocabulary, Projekt Deutscher Wortschatz, Zwiebelfisch, OpenThesaurus,
wissen.de, LinguaDict, Van Dale, Hedendaags Nederlands, IATE,
eurodicautom, Linguee, Linguee.de, Langenscheidt, Fremdwörterbuch,
loanwords, Danish Language Council, Dansk Sprognævn, retskrivning,
dansk, norsk, tysk, svenska, engelsk, ordbog, ordbøger,
retskrivningsordbog, Encyclo, Babylon, MOT, Kielikone
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The MOT dictionaries
Kielikone Ltd is a Finnish company that produces and
markets language software for business users. Its range of products
includes dictionary, machine translation and proof-reading software for
Internet, intranet and mobile use.
The firm's "MOT" Dictionary Service gives you online
access to a wide range of quality dictionaries in various languages. To
do this, you need to take out a modest subscription.
The interesting thing about MOT is that you can tailor
the service to your own needs, picking only the general and/or
technical dictionaries you actually require. Glossaries are also
available.
In addition, when you log on as a user and key in a
word to find out what its translation is, Kielikone's MOT application
presents you with a one-page list of hits found in all of the
dictionaries you've subscribed to. This saves you a lot of time you'd
otherwise have to spend leafing through different online and paper
dictionaries.
Click here to see
what general dictionaries you can use. There are digital dictionaries
from Oxford University Press, Collins and Langenscheidt, for example,
as well as various Finnish works. Further dictionaries are being added
in 2009.
If you're interested in a free trial, fill in the
request form on Kielikone's
website.
German resources
The Duden website enables users to access a range of
the publisher's own dictionaries in German,
including its large Universalwörterbuch and other works on synonyms,
foreign loanwords, and acronyms and abbreviations.
It also provides a "Sprachratgeber"
(guide on language use) and helpful information on the new spelling rules
in German.
To read the latest issues of Duden's free
newsletter on aspects of the German language
(capitalisation, phrases, sayings, etymology, etc.), just click here. (You can also
sign up to get it regularly.)
Like Duden, Langenscheidt has also made a
dictionary of foreign loanwords (Fremdwörter) used in
German available to the public completely free of charge.
The dictionary contains "approx. 33,000 of the foreign
loanwords most frequently used in German, including technical terms
used in medicine, technology, commerce, law and politics".
The full-text search feature ("Volltext") is especially
useful as it displays and explains various grammatical forms of the
term you enter (e.g. adjectives and adverbs as well as nouns). Click
here to access it.
Wortschatz-Portal
The University of Leipzig has done a lot of research on
German vocabulary and has also set up its own free-to-use "Wortschatz-Portal".
To go there, click on the blue image on the left.
The
scientific database of German terms that can be accessed here provides
details about a word's frequency, its forms, synonyms and relations to
other words and it also quotes sentences in which the word occurs in
its corpus to show you how it is used.
This is a German dictionary of synonyms
and closely related words. There were
over 41,000 synonyms listed in it in February 2007.
OpenThesaurus is an Open Source project and anyone can
contribute to it providing they register as an editor first. In
addition to the German thesaurus, there are also several other
independent language versions such as Polish, Portuguese, Slovak and
Spanish (see the section "OpenThesaurus in
anderen Sprachen" for more details).
This website enables you to search for
German abbreviations and acronyms. Click on the banner
above to call up the search page.
NB: If you can't find what
you're looking for, then go to the "Links" page on their site and see
if one of the other lists they mention looks more useful.
Bastian Sick has been writing a column on
tricky aspects of the German language for current
affairs magazine Der Spiegel for some time now and
has also published several very successful paperbacks containing
selected articles.
Just click on the name of the column above to go to the
Zwiebelfisch page on the Spiegel website. You can
subscribe to his RSS posts here.
Bastian Sick also writes a Zwiebelfisch newsletter
once a fortnight. To subscribe to it, click here.
Scandinavian dictionaries
Danish
The Danish Language Council (Dansk Sprognævn) has put a
useful spelling dictionary on the Net.
Click on the banner above to access it.
The page that opens also enables you to follow up
further links on various aspects of modern Danish such as language
policy, the Council's mission, its publications and its guidelines on
using commas.
Test your knowledge of Danish orthography at this site
or browse through the interesting list of FAQs about everyday Danish.
Norwegian
Click here
to go to "Bokmålsordboka og Nynorskordboka", an online dictionary
originally created and maintained by ILN (Institutt for lingvistiske og nordiske
studier at the University of Oslo).
This reference work was produced in conjunction with
Norsk språkråd and is currently being revised by lexicologists at the University of Bergen. The work is due to be completed in 2023.
This is a large web-based encyclopedia in Norwegian
that is free to use. The home page also
includes links to two other reference works, a large medical encyclopedia
and a biographical encyclopedia
on famous Norwegians.
Swedish
NE.se maintains a Swedish dictionary-cum-encyclopedia
on its website. This large work contains approx. 140,000 entries and
search terms with a great deal of extra information in addition to
definitions.
In the site's own words, "Här hittar
du uppgifter om hur ett ord stavas, uttalas och böjs, men även hur det
definieras och vilken ordklass det har. Vidare får du reda på annan
språkrelaterad information såsom ordled, konstruktion, bruklighet,
synonymer, betydelserelationer och betydelsenyanser."
NB: You need to register
with NE.se and then log in to be able to access some of the information.
Swedish-English
A large Swedish-English/English-Swedish internet
dictionary called Folkets lexikon (The
People's Dictionary) is available here.
This
work is based on the Lexin Swedish-English and English-Swedish
dictionary published by the Swedish Language Council, but has been
expanded as an ongoing crowdsharing project.
Further resources for you
» Go to the Patents
page.
» Read some German reviews of bilingual dictionaries
written by members of ATICOM, an association
of translators and interpreters.
» Send us some feedback.
We'd like to hear from you!
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