New and improved dict.com

September is already here as our last holidays are about to expire, it is the time for students to start concentrating in school and start paying special attention. Here at Lingea we are working to keep bringing you tools and ease your student's life. Here are a few changes that we are proud to announce this end of the summer; We have added a few new options and included word topics as a bonus.

1. Advanced search

There is a new button in the search box. What is it used for?
Full text search: If you want to find words related to a specific technical field such as; philosophy or geology, just select the abbreviation of the corresponding technical field. You can select styles such as "slang" to look up all slang words or AusE to look up words used in Australian English etc. Similarly, if you want to look up words used in per say; "Canadian French" in the French dictionary, just select CaF or select ArgE to look up words from Argentinian Spanish etc.

2. Templates:

This option has a wide range of uses. If you want to look up for example all English words starting with ab- and ending with -ly, just type "ab*ly" and the application will display: abjectly, ably, abnormally and so on. If you enter for example: n?c?, the application will look up: neck, nice and nick. This feature can be useful not only for people who enjoy crossword puzzles but for everyone that wants to make vocabulary learning more fun or use it in language games etc.

Anagrams:
This feature can be used to look up anagrams (words consisting of the same letters but in a different order). There are lots of anagrams in English and they are used in popular language games. Try entering for example: break, priest, reliant, rock, sacral or this. You will surely find many more! 


New data
All dictionaries are constantly updated. Besides the major languages (e.g. English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian), we have recently worked above all on Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Croatian or Slovenian. Also the Chinese dictionary has been enlarged. Those interested in the Baltic languages will be surely pleased to find a new morphological search in both Lithuanian and Latvian. You can also enter words in Roman alphabet without using diacritics in Greek. A detailed overview of the size of each dictionary can be seen here: https://www.dict.com/cz/sum. 

Topics
In the upper bar behind the language selection, there are new additional options of the site. Besides phrase books and grammar overviews, you can now use new vocabulary topics.

After selecting this feature, a list of topics is displayed on the left side of the window, divided into two major sections Nature and Society. Choose for example the topic Shapes under subsection Colours, shapes and numbers and you will get a list of all words included in this topic. If you click on any of these words, it will be displayed as an entry in the main window. This way you can comfortably expand your vocabulary and see the word in a broader context. See the overview of topics in text form.

About the site

Dict.com is the largest site worldwide in terms of the number of study dictionaries. It contains nearly 2000 dictionaries for various language pairs. Moreover it offers grammar overviews, phrase books, examples of use or vocabulary topics. It also contains high-quality pronunciation audio by native speakers for major European languages as well as detailed morphology tables (all word forms). Unlike computer translators it allows the users to grasp and understand a foreign language which makes is a much more convenient tool in languages learning. You can read more about this issue here: https://www.dict.com/info. 

The site is mostly visited by people from France, Germany, Norway, Greece, Turkey, USA and Vietnam. It is increasingly popular in Germany as it offers more language pairs when compared with other similar sites and in terms of quality it is ranked just behind the leading sites in this field operated by Langenscheidt publishing and Pons (see more here). Our site is also recommended by the Goethe Institute at their own site. Recently, the number of visits have been going up especially in Asian countries such as Indonesia, Japan or Vietnam