Cambridge Dictionary vs Van Dale Online

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.

Van Dale Online provides access to online dictionaries for professionals, secondary and higher education, and NT2 learners. A search checks all available sources together, with further searching available within results. Van Dale says it continues to add words and improve definitions, translations, expressions and example sentences. The professional workspace brings dictionaries in major European languages and professional reference sources onto one screen. The school edition covers Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish, with spelling, meanings, translations, examples, idioms and grammatical explanations. Its school environment has no distracting advertisements and is described as a safe learning environment. The service runs on web, iOS and Android. The mobile app requires a Van Dale Online account and an internet connection; it does not let users download dictionaries. An account can be used on one mobile device at a time, although it can be installed on multiple devices. Eligible students and staff at participating Dutch higher education institutions can sign in through SURFconext without registering. Plans include a school licence at €3 a year and professional dictionary subscriptions at €19.80 a month or €198 a year.