I have not been a voracious reader and I need a dictionary often. These are my review on different online dictionaries.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org
I found this site, when I was reading Harry Potter books. It has many interesting features. It doesn’t use Ajax and for each word it loads a whole page. This may not be a problem unless you are looking up many words in a row. Nevertheless, it’s extremely fast. It has concise meanings for words and their various forms (noun, verb, adverb …). Unlike other websites which provide useless etymology that you can’t understand and definitions from several places, it’s simple with a usage for each form. There are some disadvantages too. It doesn’t have an audio and it doesn’t show related words (synonyms).
This should be the site you should look for if you just want the meaning of a word without caring for it’s pronunciation.
http://dictionary.reference.com
This site is not as fast as the previous one. It lacks brevity. You might have rummage through the pile of information displayed for what you need. But it has some advantages over the previous site. It clubs related words together as a thesaurus and it also has an audio pronunciation.
This should be the ideal site if you wanna build up your vocabulary using a dictionary.
update (Thanks to Amit Agarwal) http://mnemonicdictionary.com
This contains many words, techniques for remembering them, pronunciation, usage, etymology and much more. It has community generated content for usages. You can also add your contribution.
Other sites haven’t interested me much.
Another stupid way to keep my blog post count ticking. This is a question to you, if you had been reading through all that I have written (typed – suppress the mokkai, if you are of my kind) – What made you read this post about using dictionaries? This isn’t even a movie review. You are all time vetti, aren’t you?
December 26, 2008 at 12:51 am
ya… coz blogging is not just about movie reviews and stuffs… lolz…
and I like cambridge dictionary very much… I go for the reference dictionary for thesaurus only…
btw Cambridge, although it doesn’t have pronounciation, it has phonetics which is really good and sufficient… but the problem with that dict is some words couldn’t be found…
December 26, 2008 at 12:53 am
yup.. i forgot to add it.. It doesn’t have words that aren’t purely English..
December 26, 2008 at 1:44 am
yup!!!
December 26, 2008 at 11:37 am
Change the theme of your blog .. It looks yuck .. and also there are other good dictionaries like http://www.onelook.com
In onelook dictionary, thr’s something called a reverse dictionary .. u describe a concept and it gives you the word ..
and you were also saying abtout the mnemonicdictionary.com
December 26, 2008 at 9:20 pm
@msk mnemonicdictionary.com doesn’t contain defintions for all words da. Only for gre.. and i wanted to make a dictionary similar to http://www.onelook.com :(
December 27, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Hey wat you said is true.. I am awake at 12 am, waitin for it to turn to 2… so im simply tryin to pass the time and hence read your post…. lolz…..
December 28, 2008 at 10:54 am
@hari haha. I also wait till 2:00 da.. bsnl is making us nocturnal :(
December 28, 2008 at 5:55 pm
@msk just thought of adding more glamour to my blog :(
January 2, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Lol. too much. u made me read it. Pakki. And u kno sumthing called wordweb? u needn go online everytym u need a dictionary.
January 2, 2009 at 10:25 pm
@Jayash That was personal :( haha.. yup heard of word web for your parrot. :)
January 2, 2009 at 10:27 pm
amorous parrot :P
January 2, 2009 at 10:28 pm
@jayash lolz..
January 5, 2009 at 3:40 pm
@Arun
hey arun, it seems you haven’t checked Mnemonic Dictionary properly.. it contains definition of more than 150000 words.. (not only GRE words)..
January 5, 2009 at 8:10 pm
oh.. May be i used it that way. Thank you for the information. I will update it..