The LEO German English dictionary
– the King of Online Dictionaries!
The LEO German English dictionary is the digital king of the online dictionary crop.
LEO is a “backronym” for Linking Everything Online and is a dictionary project initially set up by the informatics department at Munich’s technical university in the 1990’s. Here you go, have a try!:
According to Wikipedia, the LEO German English dictionary has over 465,000 entries and receives approximately 10 million queries every working day. The German English dictionary is their most extensive online dictionary although they also offer the language pairs German French, German Italian, Spanish French and, since April 2008, German Chinese.
What makes LEO so great?Well, apart from its sheer number of entries, LEO has generated a great following of translators who take the time and trouble to provide answers to anyone’s translation queries in the LEO forums. Anyone can use the forums, and queries will often be answered within minutes. (Sometimes replies can become drawn out into long discussions which provide great insight into the work of translating – and often generous dollops of humour!) When you type in a German word or phrase and request a translation, LEO will return a list of possible English translations in table form. “AE” indicates the American spelling, “BE” the British spelling. On the right-hand side of the table you’ll also see a microphone icon – click to hear an audio recording of the word’s pronunciation, plus an information icon which gives details of the sources drawn on for this definition. Beneath the table of entries you’ll find a list of orthographically similar words, plus a list of forums which deal with queries on translating this term ("Forums-Titlen, die den Suchgriff enthalten") in the form of links.
| TIP: There is a real willingness to help at LEO, but please don’t annoy contributors by asking questions before you have thoroughly searched the LEO archives. Often the answer you are looking for has been answered under a slightly different entry – try the plural if your query is in the singular, the adjective rather than the adverbial form, etc. When asking a question, make sure you provide sufficient context to enable forum users to help you. |
LEO on the go!You can also access LEO via your PDA or via SMS – see their website for details. You’ll see PDA and SMS listed in the horizontal navigation bar.LEO also offers licensed Lion shareware to download. This allows you to directly access LEO from almost all your Windows applications simply by clicking your mouse over the word you wish to have translated (no browser window required). The cost of the licence depends on the number of users registered to use the shareware. I have to say, I find it extremely easy simply to have LEO open in my internet browser and to jump back and forth between LEO and the document I am currently translating by minimising and one or the other of the windows. Call me old fashioned... Anyway, I hope you get as much out of the LEO German English dictionary as I do.
(If not, try an alternative online German dictionary.)
As ever in this internet world, try to pay back the help you receive by making contributions to the forums yourself, suggesting translations where the word or phrase in query is one you are confident of being able to translate well.
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