PRACTICE YOUR ENGLISH

British people are known for being very polite when speaking and expressing themselves. However, those who learn English and come from societies that use a more 'direct' way of communicating can misunderstand the message being transmitted.

The following is a list of examples (includes humour) that explains what a British person says, what they mean and what others understand from such expressions.

Table 1: Dictionary with ‘real’ British translation

What the British say	What the British mean	What others understand
I hear what you say	I disagree and do not want to discuss it further	He accepts my point of view
With the greatest respect...	I think you are an idiot	He is listening to me
That's not bad	That's good	That's poor
That is a very brave proposal	You are insane	He thinks I have courage
Quite good	A bit disappointing	Quite good
I would suggest...	Do it or be prepared to justify yourself	Think about the idea, but do what you like
Oh, incidentally / by the way	The primary purpose of our discussion is...	That is not very important
I was a bit disappointed that	I am annoyed that	It doesn't really matter
Very interesting	That is clearly nonsense	They are impressed
I'll bear it in mind	I've forgotten it already	They will probably do it
I'm sure it's my fault	It's your fault	Why do they think it was their fault?
You must come for dinner	It's not an invitation, I'm just being polite	I will get an invitation soon
I almost agree	I don't agree at all	He's not far from agreement
I only have a few minor comments	Please re-write completely	He has found a few typos
Could we consider some other options	I don't like your idea	They have not yet decided

Do you know the Collins brand? It’s a top world-wide company that creates dictionaries and products for the learning of languages. With an extensive experience of more than 175 years, you’re sure to find the word you’re looking for in its English dictionary.

Collins offers a free online version for its dictionary that contains over 30,000 English words and references.

For instance, if you look for the verb to keep, it will display a list with the possible results that include the verb keep and different combinations for the phrasal verbs: keep at, keep away, keep back, keep down, keep fit, keep from, keep off, keep on, keep out, keep to, keep up.

Apart from the online dictionary containing English definitions, Collins also offers a Thesaurus dictionary that has a wide range of up-to-date entries, a generous choice of synonyms, and thousands of antonyms. For example, if you look for the word though, you’ll find a big list of synonyms like strong, rough, harsh etc, along with examples that illustrate the meaning for every word in each context.

Last but not least, Collins has a tool known as Cobuild which is the indispensible reference work for intermediate learners of English. Cobuild provides extensive examples that help in getting a good understanding of the word you’re searching for in a variety of contexts or scenarios.

Visit Collins Dictionary

Are you looking for a good online dictionary? We offer you a better one, and free! It’s Reverso Dictionary.

And why is it better? Because, apart from having other very interesting services, it does everything you’d ask an online dictionary to do. Moreover, Reverso Dictionary is a bilingual dictionary not only between English and Spanish but also between English and French, German, Russian, Portuguese, Italian and Chinese.

Reverso Dictionary allows you to translate words and sentences from English to the language of your choice and vice versa. You’ll also be able to look for the definition along with the list of synonyms and antonyms for the English word that you wish. For example, for the word easy there are countless synonyms and antonyms, more than 20.

Other feature to highlight about Reverso Dictionary is its function to conjugate verbs - simply awesome! You’ll be able to write the verb that you want and it’ll show you all its conjugations (present, preterit, infinitive, imperative, participle, past participle, present continuous, present perfect, past continuous, past perfect, past perfect continuous, future, future perfect, future continuous, present perfect continuous and future perfect continuous), in short, any conjugation you might need. It also works with phrasal verbs.

What are you waiting for? Visit Reverso Dictionary

The Internet and the new technologies keep on growing. There are new words cropping up everyday and before we realize it, we run into new terms or abbreviations whose meaning is unknown to us. And what's worse, we look them up in a dictionary and we can't find them. What should we do then?

Netlingo has come to help us in this task. This hugely complete website has the mission to gather all these new words in one place. Internet-related words, technical terminology, tech jargon, terms glossary for newbies acronyms used in text messages (sms)... all this can be found in this website.

The site's neat design allows us to search by category: marketing, business, acronyms, programming, hardware, software... everything in English and using a plain language.

The first thing we find when accessing the website is 'the Word of the Day', a useful way to learn new vocabulary and that can also be customized: the Business Word of the Day, the Jargon Word of the Day, and the Acronym of the Day. It really is a very useful way to learn something new every day.

Finally, it shouldn't be forgotten that this site offers several tools to the visitor: a floating toolbar to be downloaded, a pocket dictionary, a widget for your desktop and also the possibility of visiting Netlingo's own blog.

In short, a great resource to keep you up to date with the new terms that appear in the English language :)

Link | Netlingo.com

Guest post written by Silvia, Silvia is a graduate of translation and is an official interpreter of English. She works freelance (full-time) and has more than 10 years' experience in specialised translation. Visit her blog "English for Professionals".

There are occasions when we look for a word in the English dictionary and we don’t find it. There are several reasons for this: the dictionary hasn’t been updated, the dictionary is based on British English but the word belongs to American English (or vice versa), the word we’re looking for has been misspelt, the word doesn’t exist, etcetera.

Today we’re going to examine the process that we can follow when something like this happens. We’ll be using as an example the expression “Tinker’s cuss” (one of the Strange English Words mentioned in this post).

The steps to follow could be structured as:

1. Make sure that the word is spelt right (we’ve copied it properly from the original text where we saw it).

2. Start the search in some free online dictionary. Let’s kick off with WordReference.com (not that we want to say that it’s the best, but it’s among the best and its forum is really useful). After searching “Tinker’s cuss” in WordReference.com we get No translation found for 'Tinker’s cuss' but interestingly there is an entry for “give a tinker’s cuss” in the WordReference.com forum that give us a definition for this expression.

3. Problem solved. However, let’s imagine that there was no entry in the WordReference.com forum; we still wouldn’t know the meaning of the word. We can try with another good online dictionary; in this case we make use of TheFreeDictionary. The result that we get after searching is Phrase not found in the Dictionary and Encyclopedia. Please try the words separately. But if we look beneath, there are some articles related to our search; specifically the one related to “give a tinker’s cuss” is the one that give us the right definition.

4. Problem solved again; well done WordReference.com and TheFreeDictionary! However, let’s imagine again that we haven’t found the word nor something related to it in the two previous dictionaries. We could keep looking in other dictionaries individually or change the strategy and use the online translators (google translate, Yahoo! Babel fish …) If we don’t want to visit all of them individually, we can make use of an online resource that allows us to search in all of them at the same time: Jollo is the website that we need. After searching “Tinker’s cuss” in Jollo the truth is that the results are pretty bad and we don’t find a valid translation.

5. Don’t panic! We still have a very powerful resource remaining: google. We can look for “Tinker’s cuss” in google and immediately get a result. The way of looking for it is by including the double quotes at the beginning and the end of the term “Tinker’s cuss”, so we’re telling google that we’re looking for those words in that specific order. The results that we get are linked to online dictionaries (TheFreeDictionary, Wiktionary, Dictionary.com, Urbandictionary or WordReference.com) that’ll give us what we’re looking for.

6. If in step number 5 google tells you an answer like Did you mean...? then have a look at the options that google suggests and if any of them convinces you and you can’t find related entries for the word or sentence that you’re looking for then it could be that the word doesn’t really exist. Good luck anyway!

Are you looking for an innovative and complete online dictionary? You’re lucky, because in Wordnik you’ll surely find whatever you’ve dreamed in a good English dictionary.

The truth is that Wordnik is not the traditional dictionary where you look for a word and then get the definition. Wordnik is much more and that’s the reason we like it; it’s the perfect example of an online dictionary 2.0 that collaborates with other services (like Flickr or Twitter) and that also allows the user to contribute their own content.

When you’re looking for an English word in Wordnik you’re give the following information:

• Definitions: several definitions for the word from different dictionaries like American Heritage Dictionary, Century Dictionary, Webster's Unabridged (1913) and WordNet.
• Related words: synonyms, antonyms and other words that could be related in some way.
• Pronunciations: it allows you to listen to the word with recordings from some other dictionaries or recordings by the users.
• Examples: excellent sentences and text to see the word in context and better understand its meaning.
• Twitter: it does a search on Twitter to see any tweet that contains the word you’re looking for.
• Images: different images from Flickr that are labelled with the word you’re interested in.
• Etymology: for anyone wanting to know about the origin and evolution of the word.

There is the possibility to see all this data in the Summary tab, where you can find all the above information plus some extra facts, like Statistics about the word.

If you’re also interested in collaboration with content you have several options, like adding a note about a word or recording its pronunciation.

Link | Wordnik

Would you like to quickly translate an English Word but don’t have your dictionary to hand? Well, don’t worry about that because if you are connected to the Internet you can always use an online dictionary.

Today we’d like to introduce you to a new online dictionary (although it also offers other interesting resources) that you’ll be able to add to our complete list.

The name of this online dictionary is bab.la. They say that they love languages and there are strong arguments to confirm it. Among the online resources offered in this website we would highlight:

• Dictionary: it contains a large number of dictionaries like for example English-Chinese, English-German, English-Japanese, English-Portuguese, English-Russian, English-French, English-Italian, English-Polish, English-Romanian, English-Turkish and English-Spanish. When we look for a word it appears with its direct translation (and the pronunciation that you can listen to) and it also gives you similar terms, sample sentences (in English) and related entries in the forum. Bab.la insists on the collaboration of the user and allows you to rate the translations and sample sentences, contributing to creating a better dictionary.
• Vocabulary: tens of categories to learn new vocabulary (Job, School & University, Travelling, Self-study course, Fun & Hobbies and Official exams like the TOEFL or SATs). You have to register in order to do the Vocabulary lessons, registration being free for the basic version.
• Test & Train: hundreds of tests to practice and improve your English. These tests are sorted by categories and there are some really useful ones. After finishing the test it is possible to see your score as well as the answers and by thus you can learn from your mistakes, assuming you have made any!
• Forum: a forum where you can raise your questions and help other members of the bab.la community.

In short a very attractive online resource with a great quantity of free material to learn English.

Visit bab.la

It is said that an image is worth more that a thousand words. With a visual dictionary we join both ideas: the image and the word, and the outcome is really surprising.

"Visual Dictionary Online" is a marvellous visual dictionary that contains more than 6000 images divided in 15 interesting themes: Astronomy, The Earth, The Animal Kingdom, The Human Being, Communications, Energy, and so on.

In order to look for a word in English you can surf the themes and their sections or use the website's browser. After browsing a word you'll see a list of images where the word appears. Once you've selected your chosen image you can see it in a bigger size along with the definition of the related word and even listen to the pronunciation in English.

You can see a sample of what you get when looking for and selecting the word "supermarket" (a great description with the most important areas of a supermarket):



A really valuable resource to practise English, look up and learn new words. Don't hesitate and visit Visual Dictionary Online now!

Note: For other online dictionaries (slang English, multilingual, with synonyms, etc.,) please visit our section about dictionaries.

There are several online dictionaries on the Internet where you can look up those words that you read or listen to and whose meaning you don’t know. We have already talked in the blog about some of them, such as WordReference or The Free Dictionary.

These dictionaries are very comprehensive, but they don't include slang. Fortunately, there is an online dictionary: “Urban Dictionary” that has a huge database with millions of definitions of slang words used by native English speakers.

Urban Dictionary is an online resource created by its users and its database is fed by the constant flow of definitions sent in by people. These definitions are proofread by the editors before they are published on the website.

When a new definition is added it is necessary to provide: the word, its definition, an example of use, some tags related to the word, a name (of the author), a location and an e-mail. It makes sense that for every word you need to provide a definition, but the idea of giving an example of use is really useful in order to see that word in context so you can get a better picture of the situations when the word is used.

Do you know the meaning of "lego hair"? Neither did I five minutes ago! ;)

Visit Urban Dictionary

Important: As it is an English slang dictionary, it contains every sort of word and not all of them are what you might call “nice”.

Note: If you are interested in more online dictionaries not about slang, simply look up definitions or translations from English to your native language or vice versa. You can check out the free online dictionaries' collection already existing in the blog.

Some time ago we talked about an excellent online dictionary: WordReference.com. We want to present to you today another online dictionary that compares favourably with WordReference. It is “The Free Dictionary”. Let’s look for the meaning of the word “thesaurus”. What do we get after pressing Search?

• Definition of “thesaurus” in English, with the possibility of listening to the American English and British English pronunciation.
• Explanation of the Latin and Greek origin for “thesaurus”.
• Synonyms, related words and antonyms for “thesaurus”.
• Translations for “thesaurus” to Spanish, French, German and Italian.

Interesting, isn’t it? Apart from this, “The Free Dictionary” has other very attractive functionalities to practice our English:

• Medical, legal and financial dictionaries.
• Search for acronyms and abbreviations.
• Search for sentences and idioms.
• Search for words or articles in different encyclopaedias (Wikipedia, Hutchinson, …).

To end, in “The Free Dictionary” you can also find:

• Dictionaries for Spanish, French, German and Italian languages.
• Material for Surfers of the Internet.
• Material for Webmasters: Games, Word of the Day, Quotation of the Day, …

A web page that you shouldn’t miss!

Visit TheFreeDictionary.com

What does “hush” mean? Let’s have a look in our online English dictionary, WordReference.com. This resource is very useful for looking up unknown words or words whose meanings are not easily remembered. It’s really fast; write the word, press search and in a few seconds we’ll get the meaning.

WordReference translates from English to Spanish, English to French, English to Italian, English to German and English to Russian, and vice versa.

Another attractive feature of this online dictionary is its supportive forums. Sometimes the words that we look for are not found in the dictionary entries, though they are found in the forum entries, in which case we can have a look there and see what has been written about a particular word or sentence. Moreover, if we don’t find what we are looking for we can always create a new entry in the forum and wait for someone to help us out.

Very good online dictionary… what was the meaning of that word “hush”?

Visit WordReference.com