Cambridge Dictionary vs PONS Dictionary

Cambridge Dictionary is an online reference offering English learner, academic, and business dictionaries, plus bilingual translation dictionaries. Its content draws on the Cambridge English Corpus, which Cambridge says contains more than 1.5 billion words of real English. Pronunciation pages provide British and American audio, phonetic transcriptions, and videos illustrating words and sentences. The thesaurus includes synonyms, antonyms, examples, and explanations of differences between words and phrases in British and American English. Cambridge Dictionary +Plus adds quizzes, word lists, and word games; users can create, download, and share free lists and quizzes, with up to 500 words in each list. The online plan costs nothing and includes dictionaries and +Plus word lists and quizzes. Cambridge also offers an API, a free double-click dictionary search for websites, and search widgets. Access is listed for web, Android, iOS, and extensions, with 29 languages covered. Cambridge Dictionaries Online began offering dictionaries free of charge in 1999.

PONS Dictionary is an online lookup and translation service for single words, common word combinations, and phrases; it does not search complete sentences or texts. PONS Translate provides access to 44 PONS dictionaries in 36 languages. Entries can include grammatical, stylistic, and contextual notes, and the site offers verb tables for many languages. Users can play word pronunciations, with regional variants available in some languages. The Android and iOS app can download dictionaries for offline use; in-app purchases offer dictionaries and ad-free use. The free online dictionary is ad-supported, while the paid PONS Pur subscription removes ads and video banners apart from PONS products. Words can be added directly to a selected lesson in the PONS Vocabulary Trainer. For websites and apps, the API includes a free allowance of 1,000 reference queries monthly and can cover over 12 million headwords and phrases across 13 languages and more than 34 language combinations. PONS says text submitted for machine translation and the resulting translation are temporarily stored to improve product quality.