Wordreference adds new Oxford dictionaries August 15, 2008
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Tools.trackback
WordReference is a fun little site that offers free online translation dictionaries as well as tools/plug-ins/gadgets that offer easier access to the dictionaries. The most popular dictionaries are the Spanish Dictionary, French Dictionary and the Italian Dictionary. It also has a language forum for those pesky grammar questions for people who are too lazy/don’t want to look it up in the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press’s Stylebook, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, etc.
WordReference has just announced that it has added new Oxford dictionaries to its web site. Five dictionaries are available for free:
* English-Spanish
* English-French
* English-Italian
* English-German
* English Russian
Each of the Oxford dictionaries has around 100,000 words and phrases with over 200,000 translations.
For frequent WordReference users, four larger versions of the same dictionaries (except for Russian) are available on the site by subscription.
Musings from an overworked translator 
I think they used to have Collins’ English-German dictionary on their site some time ago, but then removed it (or had to remove it on request). I am delighted to hear that German is now available again, as they used to be my favourite dictionary site (along with Leo).
The forums are good for more than just pesky grammar questions. Often when the dictionary definition doesn’t answer my question about meaning or usage, someone has already asked a relevant question in the forums and received an answer. It’s like having an interactive dictionary to which you can ask questions.
Hi Sonja and Mago – Thanks so much for letting me know. I’m not all that familiar with the site, so it helps to have feedback from those who are. I had a link to the Collins’ but found it easier to use the Collins or Langenscheidt installed on my hard drive. I’ll have to check out WordReference some more next week!