What’s The Best Spanish Dictionary Online?
Looking for a good free Spanish-English dictionary online? Well, I have done the search for you, and I am glad to say that there are some really good free Spanish dictionaries out there. But I didn’t only want to write a list of links, I also wanted to answer a simple question: What is the best free Spanish dictionary online?
To do that, I first located the five most popular online Spanish dictionaries (at least, according to Google), and then I compared them using the following (technical, slang or simply uncommon) Spanish words:
misoginia
: misogyny.fronterizo
: border, neighboring (states, etc.)feligrés
: parishioner.guillotinar
: to guillotine.instar
: to urge.sionismo
: Zionism.interpolar
: to interpolate.ósmosis
: osmosis.logaritmo
: logarithm.polaridad
: polarity.fagocitar
: phagocytize, phagocytose.libar
: to sip.pinche
: mainly it means “cook’s assistant”, but I wanted to find the Mexican slang meaning “bloody, damn”.concha
: mainly “shell”, but I was looking for the slang meaning “vulva, c*nt” (from Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay).guasa
(colloquial): joke.mogollón
(de
), (colloquial): loads (of), tons (of).fardar
(colloquial): to show off, to brag.ligar
(colloquial): to make advances, to pick up.
And here are the results. These are the most popular Spanish online dictionaries I found:
In this table I show how each of them performed on translating the words:
| Merriam-Webster | WordReference | SpanishDict | FreeDict | Google Translate | |
| misoginia | YES | YES | |||
| fronterizo | YES | YES | YES | YES | |
| feligrés | YES | YES | YES | ||
| guillotinar | YES | YES | YES | ||
| instar | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| sionismo | YES | YES | |||
| interpolar | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| ósmosis | YES | YES | |||
| logaritmo | YES | YES | YES | ||
| polaridad | YES | YES | |||
| fagocitar | |||||
| libar | YES | YES | |||
| pinche | YES | YES | YES | ||
| concha | YES | YES | |||
| guasa | YES | YES | YES | YES | |
| mogollón | YES | YES | YES | ||
| fardar | YES | YES | YES | ||
| ligar | YES | YES | YES | ||
| 18 | 10 | 14 | 17 | 2 | 8 |
It seems there is a clear winner. SpanishDict has the correct translation for 17 of the 18 words. In fact it also has a translation for the word fagocitar
, which was “to engulf, to swallow up”, but it is not a precise translation and so I did not considered it correct.
Do you know of another good Spanish dictionary online. Well, you may search the words above and see if it is even better than those I found. If that is the case, please don’t forget to drop a comment to share your findings. Happy searching!
Oct.25.2008 :: Tools, Vocabulary :: 2 Comments »
Nice test.
I feel it worth mentioning however that Google translte is a “statistical machine translation” and continues to learn.
A big super computer is fed thousands of pages of translated parallel text and told to go figure. This explains why initially it would have had more difficulties with colloquial terms, as in the beginning the text it was fed came from UN documents.
It’s still in Beta but is now open to wiki style alterations. people suggest their own translations, it looks at them, lays down some statistical analysis and then makes a decision.
Interestingly a number of the words in your list which it was getting wrong back in October it now seems to have learnt. :-)
I liked your article .. Thanks for sharing ……