Dictionary

Question

Who publishes good dictionaries? I need one for myself and some for my classroom.

Answer 1

It really depends whether you need bilingual or bilingual dictionaries. I personally trust Collins a lot, but although they may be better overall, their coverage on Latin-American terms may not be as good as an American publisher. Of course, this is just guessing, for my Collins dictionary is literally filled with American expressions I am not familiar with.

However, surely there are other good dictionaries, and they all keep improving, but when I started learning, many many years ago, Collins were -in my opinion- vastly superior to all other dictionaries. They were consistently giving me useful answers where other dictionaries failed to do so.

I think that many dictionaries have improved, and nowadays it is harder to tell the difference. Just go to a forum, pick a few "tricky" words that people failed to translate using a dictionary, compile a list, and check it against several dictionaries and see how they score. That used to be my personal test.