Wiktionary.org usually

dict.org

As an American I usually go with Merriam-Webster as being reasonably authoritative for typical American usage. Most often I’m trying to check a preferred spelling in situations where there might be more than one way to spell something.

When I need an English/French dictionary wordreference.com remains my go-to. I’ve also found Wikipedia to be useful for more technical terms by using the Other Languages feature.

I'm hitting the dictionary more for etymology than definitions and pronunciation usually, so I like etymonline.com.

Wiktionary is the most practical.

I'll be honest, it's Urban Dictionary

I can't remember the last time I needed to look up an English word. It's infrequent enough that I'd just Google it, I don't have any go-to dictionary.

But I am currently learning Japanese and Yomitan has been an extremely useful browser extension. Just mouseover a word and hit shift to summon a popup dictionary.

As a native Japanese speaker, I primarily use the following three online dictionaries:

• Eijiro, an English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionary
• Kotobank, which contains specialized content primarily in Japanese
• e-words, a dictionary specializing in information technology terminology

For actual authoritative word definitions, usages, and spelling variants, I use Oxford English Dictionary - it requires an account but most libraries include free access.

For quickly finding synonyms (and similar utility stuff) while writing, my go-to for the last few years has been WordHippo. There are plenty of other sites that give synonym lists, but in my experience WordHippo surfaces way more variety, including idiomatic expressions and slang.

For wackier definitions and slang, I like UrbanDictionary. I'd say Wiktionary, but someone already suggested that one.

I've also used dictionary.com and thesaurus.com in the past. Obvious names, but they're not terrible.

But back to UrbanDictionary - there's a lot of craziness and dross on there, but there are also plenty of diamonds in the rough.

ninjawords.com No ads, no bullshit, just a fast dictionary.

SpanishDictionary.com has been my goto while learning spanish.

First thing duckduckgo gives me.

Honestly, the folks at Merriam Webster are pretty amazing and I don't mind supporting them with a simple click.

Crowdsourced solutions are fine, but subject to armchair research and inaccuracy. If it really matters, I'd rather trust people who have studied and devoted their lives to being linguists.

OneLook. It's a meta-dictionary that lists other dictionaries which have the word. It also has a reverse lookup and pattern search which I frequently use.

https://onelook.com/

Wiktionary https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page

Just search "define [word]" on duckduckgo. Works for like 95% of things I'm looking for.

https://usito.usherbrooke.ca/

It's an amazing resource for french, will all the info you could ever need, and a pleasant search-focused ui.

The fediverse is gonna hate it, but I look up words using Siri/Alexa.