WordReference Dictionary Reviews

I used this for Spanish and it has been extremely useful in figuring out the little nuances in word choice, where the same word can be wildly different things in the various Latin American countries and Spain. I Literally it helps even to navigate discussion about emotions in a cross-cultural relationship where not every feeling translates 1:1. I just wish WordReferenceDictionary was better. It crashes, if I click on one word from the definition I can't just swipe back to the last page, I have to start the search all over again each time. And, there is no option to download sections for offline use. This would be really helpful when you're traveling abroad and data is spotty. For this, I recommend Linguee. Also, if you're looking for more examples of the word in a sentence, that Linguee app basically pulls the context for J le a word gets used in real articles online.

Best dictionary on the web for English - Spanish!

notable defects:
(1) - it’s extremely difficult to copy text (to paste in another app). You can select the text, but it’s almost impossible to see which text you’ve highlighted. This is because the highlighting is almost invisible/ fully transparent (not shaded like in every other app). So when you click “copy,” you may or may not be copying what you hope to copy.

(2) - it’s difficult to make a definition a “favorite” so you can look it up later. You can add a yellow star, but it’s almost impossible to distinguish the faint yellow of the star with the white background, so you won’t really know if you’ve starred it unless you have amazing vision. Also, if you click on a link within a definition (eg to see another definition), WordReferenceDictionary will take you quickly to that other definition, but you won’t be able to add a star to it. To add a star, you have to manually re-type the word again to look it up again, and only then will you be able to add the star (which is almost invisible anyway - see above).

(3) you can’t export your favorites, assuming you succeed in making them (see above).

The dictionary—the way it is always in progress and professionally moderated—the large and hungry board community, make it almost the only tool you need for learning. It is missing an aspect however, as it provides no way for us to take what it showed us and put it in long-term memory. They main website at least has the lists area, even though it still provides no way to drill those words other than clicking through the list. They could enable exporting to .xml which you can import to Quizlet and Anki. It’s up to them to figure out how people can choose the definitions that they want to study.
I am also giving them a lower score for their design that hasn’t been updated since the 90s. It would be cool if they let the community vote on it.

This is an incredible app that helps you understand the context of the words you are trying to communicate. My only complaint is that WordReferenceDictionary is very ugly. If it were more beautiful it would probably be the highest rated language app.
Will gladly change my rating to 5 stars as soon as they clean up the aesthetic.

I’m confused why each translation of a word doesn’t provide an example sentence and translation. Many times it only shows the example sentence in English. How is this supposed to help me if I can’t to see the word in context in the other language? Sometimes there’s no example sentence at all. It also doesn’t have pronunciation options for my target language, only for English. Why not add pronunciation for every language? The design is also not the most user friendly, and it’s buggy and crashes somewhat frequently. I would love to see some updates, or if someone could explain if I’m missing something about why there aren’t always example sentence translations.

I use it for English - Greek. I really like all the different meanings presented for words, plus phrases. That helps me very quickly learn how to use a new word.

The only downside is it seems WordReferenceDictionary doesn't save the dictionary offline. There are some regions that I travel to that don't have good signal, it would be great to have an offline version for when there's no network.

Otherwise I much prefer using this over Google translate -- they don't give such in depth explanation and options for individual words.

I’m a student in French, and I’ve been using Word Reference for the past 3 years. It is so helpful. You can fine the word in the other language, see the plurality, the gender, and an example sentence in both English and the other language. Word Reference has a big variety of languages, and you can switch between them. Overall, I’d say WordReferenceDictionary is definitely worth getting if you’re learning a new language. The best part— it’s free! You don’t have to pay anything, which is very good to know.

Word Reference has been such an amazing tool for me for almost 15 years now. The people who run this website should run the government as far as I’m concerned. I never review apps, but I’m making an exception because there are few things that are purely good in the world and this tool is one of them. I can’t speak to all the languages they include, but it has been one of the most useful tools for me when learning Spanish and French and I plan to consult it as long as the site exists.

Can you imagine this. WordReferenceDictionary does not give you the conjugation of être!! Pretty important word to neglect.
UPDATE: It does, if you can figure out how to get to it. For MOST verbs, if you look up the French verb and see the English definitions, you are looking at the top-left tab: French-English. If you click the top-right tab: French Verbs, you get the full conjugation. But not for être. While viewing the English definitions, if you scroll to very near the bottom of the page, you find a link, in French, that gets you to the conjugation. I know WordReferenceDictionary is free, but really. It isn’t what I would want as an example of the quality of my work.

This offers more features and has a more comprehensive english word-set than some of the well known and esteemed English only dictionary apps. Like the clear audio pronunciations and the IPA sounding guide for each word. I hope the developers continue to expand and add more features. I would like more personal optimization settings though. Thank you for this really helpful definition, synonym and translation tool.

I really like WordReference because of the accurate definitions and conjugations for Spanish. Instead of using Google Translate, I would look up words with WordReference instead. In fact, WordReference has helped me improve my Spanish writing because I can accurately look up conjugations for words and even search for synonyms. If you really want to improve your reading and writing for a foreign language, I recommend WordReference.

I use this for Spanish, and it is far and away my most useful language reference because it lists phrases and idiomatic expressions with examples. So many times one is helpless when faced with some idiomatic phrase. Try google translate, its laughable. But Word Reference always comes through. And detailed discussions on the forum are also extremely helpful and discuss differences between how things are spoken in different countries. *Fantastic* reference source.

I love Word Reference and have used it for a long time, but am finally about to find a new foreign language dictionary app…. Often upon opening it, it won’t let me type in the search bar and and I have to open and close it multiple times before it works. Sometimes I can type a few letters before it freezes. It’s really frustrating when living in a foreign country or traveling and just wanting to quickly look a word up

The whole point of WordReferenceDictionary is to be able to look up a word and get the right translation whenever you need to. WordReferenceDictionary does that amazingly... when the search feature works. It’s become super inconsistent lately, and sometimes I need to repeatedly close it and open it again just to make the search bar able to register the word I type. Not sure why. When you guys figure it out, my rating will instantly jump to a 5.

Great app. I regularly switch between English and Spanish daily, and I don't know what I would do without it. It provides many different translations for a single word and it's easy to figure out which one you're looking for.

However it is extremely buggy. Most of the time the back button doesn't work. I've noticed this is especially prevalent when going to the forums from a ENG-SPA term.

Sometimes the predictive drop down search bar won't go away once you tap the term you were looking for, blocking the translation.

Switching between the dictionary/definition/conjugation tabs is also laggy and sometimes just plain doesn't work.

I still love WordReferenceDictionary. It's a lifesaver. But its functionality has been getting increasingly worse.

I’ve bounced around between several dictionaries and translators and WordReference is by far the best, most thorough, complete, and frankly brilliant.
It accounts for all potential uses of a word even in very idiomatic expressions and even accounts for regional differences. IE France vs Québec vs. West Africa.
Scroll down to see the incredible amount of information given for any word. Love WordReferenceDictionary!

Very good app and it’s free.
There is improvement possible. For example could you add a settings pane so we can adjust for example the font size.

Also consider a simple yet useful feature that allows adding words to a list so we can review them later.

The dictionary is fantastic for giving you good translations (much better than Google translate and blows Apple translate out of the water). I have concerns with their stated intention to track me, however, without making it clear how to block it. The system prompt simply directed me to settings, but there was no setting related to privacy (this was WordReferenceDictionary -specific setting, not general settings). Great dictionary, but only 2 stars due to privacy concerns.

The dictionaries and forums are awesome but there are some tech issues with WordReferenceDictionary - it glitches constantly, wouldn't let me type constantly, and generally just prevents me from using it without having to restart it all the time

Edit:
Please please fix the tech issues. It's becoming unusable. I hope the IT team is doing ok. Hello? Are you still there?

i use wordreference for spanish/english nearly every day. it has much better information and context than google translate, but it seems like WordReferenceDictionary development has just stalled out. the interface is out-of-date and clunky. more importantly, it has numerous bugs that often cause it to be unable to search, and when it is able to search, sometimes it fails to find entries that do exist. in the last week, it has gotten even worse. i haven’t been able to search for anything for several days, and the latest update has not fixed this. i hope this gets fixed soon, because i like WordReferenceDictionary and it’s 100% unusable for me right now.

Works well and I love the forum discussions.i wish you would expand the capabilities of the favorite terms section. I have a long list of favorites and it is tedious to scroll through them to practice. I would like to be able to sort favorites alphabetically or export the list so that I could print them and quiz myself. Thanks!

The star for each selected term should be more clearly highlighted, its exasperating not being able to know for certain if you just starred the selected term.
Also, each term shot have a Pronunciation included. I have to constantly find pronunciations by switching to Google, this is so frustrating!
Finally, it’d be very useful to be able to create files.

I have always used word reference to help me with Spanish class. The explanations of when to use each word is very useful! However there are a few things that could be done better. One, maybe explain how the meaning of a word changes when used in different tenses, for example words have different meanings when in preterite vs imperfect.

There are three huge things that are very IRRITATING with the new update.
•The stupid banner that runs across the bottom shrinks the screen size greatly.
•When you switch from Spanish to English and English to Spanish, the word you have entered in the search bar disappears. This causes you to have to retype it.
•There used to be a forward and a backward button. Now there is only a backward one. If you are trying to switch off between the definitions of two words, you now have to re-type it in, and you can't press a forward button.

Other than that, WordReferenceDictionary is really amazing, and I would recommend as the best translator around. Just please fix those problems, and it will be easily 5 stars!

I’ve used WordReferenceDictionary for Spanish/English translation constantly over a couple years. I’ve never had a problem until now. It’s gotten increasingly buggier since October and now I can’t search at all. The last update kind of made it worse. Please fix it soon! Google translate is garbage and Word Reference has always been my go-to.

WordReferenceDictionary works wonders for when I’m in French class or doing homework. My teacher recommends it for when SHE doesn’t know a word. It works very well and makes your brain work to string together words. All in all I rate it 5/5.

WordReferenceDictionary has been in my list favorites fir a while now. I love WordReferenceDictionary every time I have to look up for the meaning or synonyms of a English or Spanish word WR never fails. Very complex and easy to understand. Thank you

I use it primarily for English/Spanish translations but have also used it for simple German. Have used it for many years, and before there was a cellphone app. The forum is great too.

I’ve never reviewed an app before but this one deserves a review. I am a professional interpreter/translator and I use WordReferenceDictionary daily to support my work. It is reliable and accurate.