About the portal in brief:

The Internet contains a large number of dictionaries of mediocre quality. Dict.com portal offers quality and value for a number of reasons: although developed using state of the art technologies and procedures, dictionary entries are structured and arranged using the traditional look of reputable printed dictionaries.

What the users may find useful:

• Detailed dictionaries for 32 languages, each offering up to 45 000 entries for one source language
• Exceptional quality of the information comparable to the most prestigious printed dictionaries
• Dictionary entries are always adapted to the user's mother tongue: phonetic transcription, context as well as morphological information (provides all word forms)
• Other related titles can be displayed for major European languages (centre drop-down menu of the upper bar):
  • Phrase Book
  • Grammar overview
  • Word usage and other useful info
• Fast and intelligent search:
  • Will look up a word entered in any form
  • Suggests the correct headword after typing just the first 3 letters
  • Offers spelling suggestions
  • Full text search will look up related examples and phrases
• User-friendly interface
  • Clearly arranged display of the entry, synonyms, topics as well as full text search results
  • Contains a virtual keyboard for typing characters that may not be on your keyboard
  • Provides search history
• Entries feature all relevant information: word class, gender, phonetic transcription, accents, style, branch and region specification, contextual info, prepositional phrases, examples of use, idioms etc.

How can dict.com help you?

• understand written and spoken language correctly
• acknowledge the differences between similar words and their precise meanings
• choose the most suitable equivalent for a given context and use it in the correct form or collocation
• actively expand your vocabulary using 100 topics for vocabulary memorization
• practice correct pronunciation

What ensures the quality of the dictionaries?

• They are created by professional linguists. No machine translation or automated corpus extraction is involved.
• They are updated on a regular basis, new words and phrases are added regularly.
• Many of the language titles are also published in print in 10 European countries.
• We have been developing our dictionaries for over 20 years now.
• We also engage in other language-related areas such as machine translation and speech technologies.

Dictionary versus machine translation

Unlike computer translators such as Google Translate or Bing Translator, dict.com site offers authentic bilingual dictionaries created and maintained by actual professional linguists. Computer translators usually offer just one translation for a given word regardless of particular context, if more equivalents are suggested there is no specification or contextual info regarding its precise meaning. In contrast, dict.com dictionaries contain multiple possible translations with extended additional information – differentiated and numbered meanings of the word including examples of use, which help the user choose the relevant equivalent for a given context and also use that equivalent correctly in active communication.

The translations provided by computer translators (machine translation) are the result of automated processing of huge amounts of text, which is then used to compile particular language and translation models. Automation and insufficient (or no) human inspection and correction often result in various ambiguities and errors creeping into the data leading to incorrect or even absurd translations. Even the latest computer translators based on neural networks provide perfectly correct translations for only about 50 percent of sentences translated.

When English is neither the source nor the target language, most of the existing computer translators automatically transfer the source text into English and this text becomes the base of the translation used to feed the target language. Dual machine translation thus creates space for a double amount of possible errors and ambiguities.

A computer translator may be a useful tool for people who have very little or no knowledge of a foreign language and need a quick indicative translation of entire sentences or articles. It may, however, be unsuitable or even harmful to language learners, who must grasp and understand the substance and workings of the language, at the same time perceive the differences of meanings as well as subtle distinctions between words and learn to form the sentences correctly. These language learners and similar users are those who will find dict.com site much more useful and helpful.