I’ve used a few online dictionaries while doing Spanish, but lingro.com, which I came across today, is one of the most useful I’ve seen yet. On others, you enter a word at a time, and have to keep switching between the piece of prose you are reading and the web page that has the dictionary. Lingro, on the other hand, acts like a kind of overlay on whatever you’re reading. You click on a word you don’t understand, and the definition is provided right there. It works for French, German, Italian and Polish as well as Spanish.
It’s not as authoritative as the dictionary of, say, the Real Academia Española, and sometimes it’s a little too colloquial for classroom use: the only definition it gave for lío — which can mean a mess or a muddle — was “f— up”. But it’s good enough for intermediate-level students who find themselves tripped up in the pages of El País by the odd unfamiliar word or phrase. You can also use it to build wordlists to expand your vocabulary and compile flash cards to test yourself. And it’s free. I’ll certainly be recommending it to my fellow students at the Cervantes Institute — which has just added a useful tool of its own, Cervantes TV. My broadband service, unfortunately, is so slow at the moment that I can’t make the most of it.