Merriam-Webster's Advanced Learner's English Dictionary

Large number of example sentences, and free partial download

Ease of use rivals that of the 7th edition of Oxford Advanced Learner's but word-completeness is about half as much (100K words vs 183K). This limitation is made up by its large number of well-selected example sentences/phrases - very useful for both native and foreign speakers. The free online Mobipocket-download version of the dictionary is easy to use but unfortunately the very useful "Geographical Names" section (16 pages of place names with IPA pronunciations) is deleted from the online version. When the Mobipocket application is invoked on your PC, you can turn on a feature so that pressing the "F2" key will give you an instant small pop-up window of the word-definition of any highlighted word on your Windows screen. It's great for reading any heavy-duty online documents or web pages. I'm getting addicted to this feature! But then the Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionary (7th edition) is available on Mobipocket too so maybe this F2 feature is similarly available. If you have young children using this dictionary, try picking the paperback version instead of hardback since the former is more kids-friendly for page flipping, and less intimidating than the bulkier hardback one - even though the latter costs just a few dollars more. Overall, highly recommended if you treasure good examples more than word completeness. If not, you should probably pick Oxford Advanced Learner's. Read more