When I started with my English philology career, I used dictionaries such as, reverso, translendium and many others, but soon I realized that they are not as good as many other online dictionaries, such as Cambridge dictionary online.
One of the main reasons for using this dictionary instead of using many others is that “Cambridge dictionary definitions are clear and easy to understand, written using a carefully selected list of words, created jointly with teachers from around the world”. Indeed, it is ideal if you want to prepare any English exam such as IELTS, PET, FCE, CAE, CPE and BEC, because, their CD-ROMs have many interactive exercises which help you building your vocabulary, improving your pronunciation and looking up words automatically.
Apart from these, Cambridge provides you with many dictionaries which can help you depending on the level of English that you have and the area that you want to improve. Here are some examples:
- Cambridge Essential English Dictionary
” This dictionary is the perfect introduction for beginner to pre-intermediate learners.”
- Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary
This dictionary “gives students the support they need to develop their language skills, whether they are learning English for work, pleasure, or preparing for an exam”
- Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
This dictionary is ideal if you want to prepare the exams of FCE, CAE, CPE, BEC and IELTS.
As the years have passed Cambridge dictionaries online have made some changes in order to improve the site; for example, they have added sound to their site, this way learners can improve their pronunciation. Furthermore, they have added topic information to some of the dictionary entries, based on the SMART thesaurus; so now, when you look up a word that’s part of a topic, you’ll see a group of words that are related to the word you looked up in a cloud on the right-hand side. The words in the cloud are bigger or smaller depending on how frequently they are used.
On the other hand, as I have mentioned before reverso is not as good as this dictionary, because I think that it is much simple than the other one. For example, the Cambridge dictionaries are better organized, because first appears the different categories (verb, adjective, noun,…) of the word, because depending if it is one category or another the word is going to have a different meaning, so this way is more comfortable for us to look up the meaning that we want. Apart from that, Cambridge dictionaries provides the user with the pronunciation of that word in both languages, British and American, and gives you many examples; Reverso, on the other hand, does not give the pronunciation of that word, and the examples are less appropriate, but they translate the examples into Spanish, this way the readers understand better the meaning of the word.
To finish with this comparison, Cambridge online dictionary is connected with thesaurus, so that, when you look up a word in Cambridge online, you could also see that word in Thesaurus dictionary; but in the Reverso Dictionary there is no other dictionary.
In conclusion, these dictionaries are very appropriate to improve our English; especially, because they bring us a lot of facilities in order to learn easier and quicker.
- Cambridge Dictionaries online. Retrieved: 16 March, 2010 at 20.30 from http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/default.asp?dict=A
- Reverso Dictionary online. Retrieved: 10 May, 2010 at 20:00 from http://diccionario.reverso.net/
