hi everyone welcome back to my channel learn academic english in today's video i'm going
to talk about how to use an online dictionary and what the best online dictionaries are for english
learners please give this video a like and leave a comment if you find it helpful i believe that
it's super important for english learners to have access to good dictionaries to use them often and
to use them wisely so that you can improve your vocabulary as much as possible there are lots of
good free online dictionaries each one is a little bit different but any of them would work great
if you have access to a book dictionary that's also a great tool but an online dictionary is
going to provide you with some other information that you might find fun or interesting so first
we're going to look at learnersdictionary.com which is my pick for the best
basic online dictionary for english learners so first of all why do i like learnersdictionary.com
well it's from the merriam-webster dictionary company which is a great dictionary company
and i like this because right here on the home page they have the box where you can
search for a word and we'll do one of those in just a moment but then they also have features
like word of the day this is an excellent way for you to improve your vocabulary by coming here
every day and just learning one word so this is the basic information it has the word it
has a little demonstrator demonstrator okay we can listen to the pronunciation
there's a picture that can help us to remember the meaning and of course there's the definition
but if we click on learn more we can see more and so we can see here that if we click on learn more
we can see the word the word written in ipa to help us know how to pronounce it and you can see
here that this little line shows us that that's the stressed syllable so the stress syllable
is the first one and then there's secondary stress on this one demonstrator demonstrator
we can listen to the word again if we want to there's the part of speech this word is a noun
and it gives us the plural form demonstrators there's a picture that helps us remember and
finally we can see that it's a count noun there is the definition we have some example sentences
and we have a second definition with a second example at which one are you going to choose well
the first one is always the most common one so that's the one that you should choose if you have
more than one but it might be useful for you to learn the second definition as well okay so
that's word of the day an excellent way for you to improve your vocabulary just by coming here
and learning the word of the day every day okay next ask the editor ask the editor as a section
where english learners can ask a question and then a person who works for the dictionary will answer
the question the answers are always very clear and specific and correct so for example this one is
asking us what are the plural forms of check-in passerby and spoonful and these are types of
compound nouns that can have some tricky plural forms if we click on learn more we can read a more
detailed explanation so you can see again here's the question and here is the answer but
what i like to do is i also like to take a look at the archive that's going to have more
questions and answers so if we click on february which is the month that we're in right now
we can see that there are two ask the editor questions now the first one was about active
and passive voice um probably they do one once a week but if we go back and click on january
we can see that there are more some of these are easier some of them are more advanced so you know
you can kind of choose the ones that are the right level for you okay so that's ask the editor again
you can click into the archives to see the older ones next we can click on quizzes and
this website doesn't have a lot of quizzes some online dictionaries have more the first quiz
is that you can find out how strong your vocabulary is and so if we click on that
we can see that it asks us to take this 10 question quiz
and that you could try it as often as you would like because they have many different versions
so if we try the first one it says click the best synonym for advocate
advocate would be a defender someone who defends you click the best synonym for energy
i would probably say power okay and you can see that it's correct you get a bonus for
going more quickly reject would be the same thing as turn down that's a phrasal verb
okay so that's how that works um if you go back to quizzes there's also one about um a visual
let's go back to the home page and you can see that on the home page they have access
to those quizzes again and there are also the most popular words that people are looking up
and there's an invitation for you to get the free app on your phone um and you can click here
and type a word so maybe we want to know the word courtesy so what happens if we search for the word
courtesy if we search for the word courtesy we can see that there are three entries and
the noun is going to be the most common one so let's take a look at the noun courtesy
so again we have the ipa we can listen to the word and it tells us that courtesy is a non-count noun
that's a polite behavior that shows respect for other people
here's an example sentence they treated us with courtesy and kindness or he didn't even have
the common courtesy this is a common thing that we say common courtesy and it explains
what does that mean we also have the count noun definition and then we have
some other ways that we can use the word courtesy we can say courtesy of something
or other ways like how it might be used informally finally there's the adjective
and you can notice that the top one is going to be the most common one all right so this is
learnersdictionary.com it's a great basic everyday dictionary if you create an account you can save
your word and then you can create word lists and you can click on my saved words to access that
all right let's go to the next one and the longman dictionary is l-d-o-c-e on line the longman
dictionary is my pick for a great dictionary that has a little more information so the
first thing we want to do here is notice how the website works so we have our search box here and
we also have word of the day you can see that it doesn't have as much maybe interesting information
about the word as the previous website did it doesn't have a picture but if we click on it
we can see that it tells us this word ungainly that it's an adjective and then there are two
pronunciations that's because one is british and one is american the first one is british
the second is american ungainly ungainly okay so you can notice that those pronunciations it
gives us the definition and then it gives us an example phrase with this word and then it tells us
a related form which is the noun form this is nice because this related form is sometimes
missing in the learner's dictionary that we saw before okay the next thing that i like
about this dictionary is that it gives us examples from the corpus what is the
corpus the corpus is a collection of real-life examples that were spoken by native speakers
so you might find these useful because these are real examples that people actually said
and it also gives us the origin of the word which is probably not useful for you but if
you're interested in that it is there on the right side you can see that there's also access
to quizzes so let's click on those quizzes and see what it is so this website also has ads like the
previous one but i feel like the ads for this one are not quite as um bothersome okay so for
english vocabulary quizzes we have collocations phrases prepositions synonyms and phrasal verbs
and in addition to those quizzes there's also the english language exercises let's click on that
for the english language exercises there's hundreds of vocabulary exercises there's grammar
listening and pronunciation and exam prep so again a lot of great information here that i'm sure
you will find useful finally the other thing i wanted to mention is that always on the right side
you can see that they have some pictures with um a question that you can check and
they have topics so this can be useful for you if you want to say oh you know today i want to
learn a lot of vocabulary about family or about trains this is a good way to learn vocabulary
that you learn a lot of words about the same topic at once so what happens if we click on family you
can see that it gives us a lot of words that if we see something new we might want to click on it
and it gives us um a lot of other words including collocations okay what are
collocations collocations are words that are used together super useful information to
get from your dictionary for example the whole family we invited the whole family
all the family somebody's immediate family extended family okay single parent family the
nuclear family these are all collocations that will help you to make your vocabulary bigger
about this particular topic and i wanted to just say one last thing about this website which is
that the nice thing about this is that it has the pronunciation in both british and american english
so this is great for you if you're learning british or american you can do both here okay
finally let's look at the cambridge dictionary so if we go to dictionary.cambridge.org we're going
to get this home page and then from there we can choose what we want to do and what i'm going to do
right now is i'm going to show you down here that they have various dictionaries you can choose from
the learner's dictionary is a little bit bigger but it is british so if you're learning british
english or if you don't particularly care if it's british or american this would be a good choice
for you and then there's the essential american english so if you're learning american english
this is a good one but essential american english it's a lower level dictionary it's more basic and
then you can also see that they have some related topics like there's grammar there are translation
dictionaries that you might find helpful so let's click on this essential american english
dictionary okay so here we are on the essential american english dictionary from cambridge and
you can see that at the top we have dictionary translate grammar thesaurus and dictionary plus
so let's take a look at the homepage and see what we have here first of all we have popular
searches so you can come here and say do i know all of these these are popular searches right now
if you're curious you can just browse the dictionary so you could click on
b and you can look at the dictionary pages kind of like you would do if you opened the dictionary to
a random page so this might be nice to help you learn some new words that you're not expecting
and it gives you some idea of how the dictionary works and then finally down here we have the blog
which has articles so if you're looking for some readings this would be a great place to go to get
some readings let's take a little look okay so here we have an article about science it's called
genes molecules and momentum talking about science and so if you're interested in science it gives a
little background about what biology chemistry and physics are and we have some people leaving
some comments in addition we have more um posts so again this would be great if you want to improve
your vocabulary and your english by reading let's go back and look at the home page again
so another thing the home page has is a word of the day like we saw on the other ones and this
one is head over heels in love what does that mean completely in love but let's learn more click on
about and here you can get the definition and then it gives you some other words that are similar um
i personally feel that the other websites do a better job with their word of the day
but there is down here more information with a definition and then a sentence okay so that's
the word of the day all right then if we go back and we click on grammar let's see what they have
so there are some grammar lessons here everyone likes grammar lessons these are great um again
this dictionary is designed for lower level learners so some of this may be a little too
easy for you but it also might be really helpful let's take a quick look at one of these let's
try prepositions and particles let's see what's there so it tells us that words such as in over
and with are prepositions and we often use them as a particle like looked up or the plane took off
and then we have a lot of related information about prepositions and particles so it
looks like those grammar lessons are a little bit smaller but perhaps helpful
um here's one about prepositional phrases it tells what a prepositional phrase is
and then gives us several examples so that's good and yeah there's a pretty good explanation here
okay so those are the grammar lessons let's take a quick look at this dictionary plus what is that
so it tells us here that the dictionary plus you can get an app and that if you create
an account you can make word lists this is also available on the other websites that i showed you
but that would be really useful for you to create your own word lists and there are quizzes finally
there are some word lists that are already created so let's take a quick look at those
okay so this word list is words for describing things and you can download it we have a lot of
new words here with both the american and the british pronunciation oh boy a lot of
these words are great words like vast this is a word i teach my students or artificial
shallow okay these are great so to sum up the cambridge dictionary would be a good choice
if you're a newer learner of english and you can see that there aren't a lot of ads on this website
however i prefer the learner's dictionary for the best basic online dictionary and i also like the
longman because it has more information and more detail about the words including collocations and
examples from the corpus you might also find that using all three of the websites gives you a great
combination you would have three new words of the day if you went to each one of them every day
and you can create an account and make a word list on any of those sites so let me know in
the comments below how you use online dictionaries and if you found this video helpful please don't
forget to give it a like and leave a comment and subscribe if you have not done so already
i love to talk about learning vocabulary so also let me know if you have any tips or questions
and i will make more videos about vocabulary soon take care and i'll see you back here soon