Learn Spanish Online Ireland

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 found the five seven 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:

Misogyny: misogyny. border: border, Neighboring (states, etc.) parishioner: parishioner. guillotinar: to guillotine. urge: to urges. Zionism: Zionism. interpolate: to interpolate. osmosis: osmosis. logarithm: logarithm. polarity: polarity. engulf: phagocytize, phagocytose. libar: to sip. click: mainly it means "cook's assistant," but I wanted to find the Mexican slang meaning "bloody, damn." shell: mainly "shell", but I was looking for the slang meaning "vulva, c * nt" (from Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay). guasa (colloquial) joke. Mogollon (de), (colloquial): loads (of), tons (of). fardar (colloquial): to show off, to brag. link (colloquial) to make advances, to pick up. Update Oct-05-2012 (five new obscure words): taray: tamarisk. zurumbático: stunned, dazed. pintiparar: to compare something to another thing, or to make something look like another thing. protervia: protervity, wickedness, peevishness. taheño: red (hair), Having a red hair or beard, ginger.

And here are the results. These are the most popular Spanish online dictionaries I found:

•  (new)
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In this table I show how each of them performed on translating the words:

MWT WRF SDT FDT GTR DCT TFD misogyny 1 1 1 1 1 1 border 1 1 1 1 1 1 parishioner 1 1 1 1 1 1 guillotinar 1 1 1 1 1 1 instar 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Zionism 0.5 1 1 1 1 1 interpolate 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 osmosis 1 1 1 1 1 log 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 polarity 1 1 1 1 1 1 engulf 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 libar 1 1 1 0.5 1 1 click Jan. 1 0.5 1 1 shell 0.5 1 1 1 1 1 guasa 1 1 1 1 1 1 Mogollon Jan. 1 0.5 1 1 fardar Jan. 1 0.5 1 1 link 1 1 0.5 1 January taray 0.5 1 1 zurumbático 1 1 1 pintiparar 0.5 1 0.5 1 1 protervia 1 taheño January 47, 83% 80.43% 97.83% 17.39% 73.91% 84.78% 80.43%

And the winner is…

It seems there is a clear winner. SpanishDict has the correct translation for 17 22 of the 18 23 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 (for the purposes of this comparison).

Update Oct-05-2012: Since the date when this article was first written (back in 2008), things has changed a bit. First, Google Translator doesn’t have a dictionary, as such, anymore. Now it has only one function: translate texts. It’s still possible to use it as a dictionary, but sometimes it is necessary to include some “context” for it to decide the right translation. In any case, it certainly has improved a lot since then. Second, now two other good dictionaries are also competing for the crown: Dictionary.com and TheFreeDictionary.com.

So, I repeated the comparison including the two new contenders. Also, this time I gave half a point to any result that is not the precise translation I was looking for, but at least could be of some help (like “to engulf, to swallow up”).

At first, the result was three dictionaries in a tie, so I decided to make things really hard. I added five new, really obscure, words. In fact, until today, I didn’t even know these existed: taray, zurumbático, pintiparar, protervia and taheño.

Well, guess what, the winner is, again, SpanishDict. In fact, it is the only one that have translations for each of the five new words. Pretty impressive!