Spanish Course Almunecar

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:

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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!

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!