What is this?

Hi! My name is Ulrik, and this is my student blog. My posts will be based on tasks and subjects given to the class by my English teacher Ann. I am currently in my third year at Sandvika High School, Norway.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The English dictionaries


The good, the not so good, and the ugly one

There's so many online dictionaries to chose from, many of them are totally crap, and the good ones often costs money. I will try to compare three different  free online English dictionaries, and hopefully find a good one. 


The Free Dictionary 

The first dictionary i found, was www.thefreedictionary.com. At first glance it looked a little bit chaotic, and not very user friendly. How ever, after looking around on the site, i found out that it has a whole lot of languages(i will only write about the English), and a lot of possibilities. On the left side of the site i found different categories within the English language. I clicked on "legal dictionary", and found myself looking at a list of some popular words like "income tax". If i clicked at "income tax", I found a whole article about the meaning of the word, how it is used, and what it is used for.
However, I could not search within the legal dictionary, I could only search the entire dictionary. I don't know why, but that was the case. So then i tried to search the word "Hi", and got a whole lot of different definitions. All of them making sense.
Expect from looking a bit old and a little chaotic, this dictionary is definitely acceptable.

                         The Cambridge Dictionary

The second dictionary i looked at was www.dictionary.cambridge.org. This looked much nicer than thefreedictionary.com. The site was smooth, and easy to navigate on. Like the other one, this had some different categories, but on this one you could easily search within the category you wanted. However, here i did not find whole articles about words like "income tax", only a short definition. So this site looked much better than the other one, but it did not have so many definitions or articles explaining  deeper. But i would recommend this if you just want to look up a word.


One look                          

The last dictionary i will look at, is www.onelook.com. When i went on the site, i came straight to a search field. I search the word "fish". Then i was told that they had found 98 English dictionaries, who contained the word "fish". I clicked on the first hit, and got redirected to a yahoo site, which said everything i needed to know about the word "fish". However, when i clicked on another link, i got no results at all.So what this page do, is redirecting you to another dictionary. So i would not recommend this site, since you have to click around until you find a good definition. Pages like the Cambridge dictionary, and the free dictionary are much smoother to use, and they have good definitions. Personally i think i would use the Cambridge dictionary.

                                    



1 comment:

  1. Very informative post about using different dictionaries. Seems like the last one isn't really a dictionary at all. Could to have that covered! The Cambridge dictionary should be good! I agree with you there!

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