Spanish language resources

The dictionary of reference for Spanish, it is the result of collaboration between all of the language's academies and aims to document the general vocabulary used in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries.

A selection of dictionaries published by the Royal Spanish Academy. It includes general language dictionaries, historical dictionaries (providing insight into how Spanish was used in determinate past eras), a specialist dictionary on legal Spanish, a dictionary answering common doubts, as well as various other such works.

A reverse or ideological dictionary that lets you search for words by concept. It does not give the definition of a given word, as traditional dictionaries do, instead it returns words using the search terms found in their definitions.

Abbreviations dictionary providing the definitions of acronyms, initialisms and other shortened forms. It provides over a million definitions, as well as 850,000 postal codes from Canada and the United States. This resource offers a range of filters for different subject areas, allowing you to hone your searches to fields such as IT, military & government, business & finance or science & medicine.

A dictionary of synonyms.

Online thesaurus for Spanish synonyms, with search results subclassified according to main meanings.

A tool to find the definitions of terms and their antonyms.

The Diccionario de americanismos has a collection of 120,000 entries, including specific words and phrases used in Latin American Spanish.

A specific Mexican lexical dictionary from the Mexican Academy of Language.

A dictionary of Mexican expressions from the Mexican Academy of Language.

A specific Colombian lexical dictionary from the Colombian Academy of Language.

A tool to find the word selected and offer its definition, synonyms and antonyms or translation into other languages.

The Inter-Active Terminology for Europe (IATE) is the EU's inter-institutional terminology database. IATE is used in the EU institutions and agencies for the collection, dissemination and shared management of EU-specific terminology.

Linguee is a unique translation tool combining an editorial dictionary and a search engine with which you can search billions of bilingual texts for words and expressions.

The English-Spanish dictionary offered by Oxforddictionaries.com.

The dictionary from the Spanish Royal Academy offering academic responses to common doubts about the Spanish language.

The Fundéu BBVA portal, its aim is to promote correct use of Spanish in the media. It resolves doubts and offers recommendations for usage.

A participative portal for sharing practical information on Spanish norms, use and style.

A portal to resolve doubts on punctuation and accents, grammar, style, format and composition.

A portal publishing articles on the Spanish language from the Cervantes Institute, which supports and disseminates the Spanish language throughout the world.

Content focusing on Spanish historical linguistics, with articles and videos explaining how this language's phonetics, grammar and word forms have evolved from Latin to the present day.

A website for conjugating over 12,000 verbs; it also offers synonyms for each verb.

The dictionary of reference for Spanish, it is the result of collaboration between all of the language's academies and aims to document the general vocabulary used in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries.

A historical corpus with over 100 million words from texts from the 13th to the 20th century. It also allows for semantic searches.

A search engine for finding Spanish words used between the years 2001 and 2012. You can see the words' source texts, allowing you to better understand their contexts. Its ultimate goal is to compile some four hundred million entries from the Spanish language, used by around five hundred million people in Spain, the Americas, the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea. The aim is to do so by the end of 2018.

A search engine to find the Spanish words currently used in the written media. The tool is able to give the source that the terms come from and provide the context.

A search engine for Spanish words used throughout history. The tool is able to give the source that the terms come from and provide the context.

An online search engine that charts the frequencies of search strings within a massive corpus. If you search more than one expression (separated by commas), the chart will compare the frequency with which each expression appears in a corpus made up of books from the years 1500 to 2008. It can be used with a variety of languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, and Spanish). The results can be used to find and select the terms or turns of phrase that are used most often.

A selection of Spanish sayings, with their corresponding translations. You can also find variations and synonymous expressions, hyperonyms and antonyms, alongside other information.

^{Sevilla Muñoz, Julia & Maria Teresa Zurdo Ruiz-Ayúcar, dirs., Refranero multilingüe. Madrid: Instituto Cervantes / Centro Virtual Cervantes, 2009. https://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/refranero/Default.aspx}

The largest pronunciation guide in the world, the place where you can find millions of words pronounced in their original language. Registered users can add their own new words.

The blog by José Antonio Millán, it has a large of number of dictionaries (for doubts, registers, etymology, etc.), a list of terms from the digital world and general reflections on language.

A blog from the Humanities Department at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

Of particular use among the applications offered by language technology supplier Signum are the spell checker; a verb form corrector that includes the voseo forms used in various parts of Latin America; a syllable separator and hyphenator (with results that sometimes vary depending on preferences to split words by phonetic syllables or by hyphen position for line ends); a lemmatizer; a number engine that transcribes digits into letters; and a search engine for phonetically similar words.

IAtext (the University Institute of Textual Analysis and Applications) of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria offers this application to convert numbers into their written form. Enter a number (using standard Arabic numerals) and the converter will show how it is written alphabetically in Spanish, English, Italian or German. It is particularly useful for making sure that ordinal numbers, multiplicative numbers, fractions and Roman numerals are written and spelt correctly, something which can often be tricky.

IAtext (the University Institute of Textual Analysis and Applications) of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria offers this online text analysis application. It accepts electronic files (in formats .txt, .doc, .docx or .pdf) and performs an automatic analysis telling you the number of characters, words, stopwords, different words, sentences and paragraphs the file contains, in total and on average. It also produces statistics on the grammatical categories of the words and the verb forms. This is all useful for analysing writing style, getting a more detailed picture of a text before revising or translating it, and even for contrastive linguistic studies.