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?
