This week, my App Smart column was all about the delights of using dictionary apps on your smartphone or tablet. These apps can help you quickly look up a word’s meaning and usage or learn new words. Compared with a printed paper edition, dictionary apps on your mobile device can also let you share words you’ve found over social media or even quickly swap between looking up text in a dictionary or a thesaurus.
Many big names in dictionary publishing have released apps, and Oxford is perhaps one of the best known. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary is one of the most powerful apps you can get on iOS, though you have to pay $29.99 to access it. Where some similar apps emphasize quick access to word definitions and other useful information like synonyms, this app instead offers full dictionary entries that include examples and even photos.
The app can also teach you the right pronunciation with real British and American voices instead of computer voices. You can download the audio database for all of the 116,000 example sentences so they can be accessed offline. The app even suggests spelling, so you can find the word you’re looking for even if you don’t exactly know how to spell it. The main drawback is that this app’s screen can seem cluttered on a small iPhone display. If the clutter bothers you, you can choose to tell the app to, for example, turn off photos or example sentences.
An alternative, simpler iOS dictionary app is WordBook English Dictionary and Thesaurus, at $1.99. Its design is plainer than many of its peers. It offers a basic ability to look up a word in its database of some 150,000 entries. Each entry includes a pronunciation guide and spoken audio, although you need an Internet connection to get the audio to work. The app includes both British and American spellings of words, but the entries are written in American English.
It also has the ability to search several different online dictionary sources if the word you want can’t be found in its built-in word database. For fun there’s also a “puzzle solver†system that can help you solve anagrams or find words from partly solved crossword clues. It’s not the prettiest app, and you may find yourself yearning for a bit more context or background in each dictionary entry, but at least it’s speedy to use.
On Android there’s also the Dictionary app by Farlex. It’s free in an ad-supported edition, and includes both British and American audio pronunciation guides, and when it returns data on words, it can display some very extensive information. For example, the word “tap†returns some four or five scrollable pages of text, including images and alternative meanings of the word, example uses, history of the word and so on.
But sometimes it can seem like there’s too much data to look through, and it’s all presented in a similar way, which means you have to exercise your own judgment as to which of the results are useful to you. On the other hand, it can work offline, though you have to download data to the app while you have a connection. Plus it has the ability to look up words in several foreign languages, including Spanish and Russian.
Have fun improving your vocabulary!
Quick call: Paper Toss 2.0 is a new edition of the popular casual game, free on Android. The objective is simple: You have to toss scrunched-up paper balls (or bananas and a number of other objects) into a target trash can. The company says it’s like the classic office “time waster†game made digital.
