Spanish dictionaries

We all need to use Spanish dictionaries all of the time to improve our vocab. I use three: two online, and one on my mobile phone.

My main dictionary is the Concise Oxford Spanish Dictionary, which I have loaded on my mobile phone (SonyEriccson W950i), and which previously I had on various P900 models. It's available for the variants of the Symbian operating system for smart phones, so will work on many of the Nokia smart phones. You'll need to know what operating system is running on your phone to get the correct mobile version. A good starting point would be here. I'll look at this in a subsequent post, and explain why I like this dictionary so much.

Online I use WordReference.com - this is a fantastic resource, which has the added benefit of a very active forum through which you can get answers to questions about definitions of phrases, spanish useage etc. Again, I'll cover this in detail in a forthcoming post.

Finally, I use the Diccionario de la Lengua Española from the Real Academia Española, which is the official guardian of the spoken and written spanish language. I use this to look up definitions of word in Spanish - there is a school of thought which says that one should try and use a Spanish dictionary (not bi-directional English-Spanish) to look up unfamiliar spanish vocab once you have reached the intermediate stage of learning. This works for many words, but for those with many different meanings (try looking up 'echar' in it and you'll see what I mean) I find I need to revert to the tried and trusted bi-directional method).