Dictionary - Merriam-Webster

Merriam-Webster Inc.

Contains adsIn-app purchases

About this app

Get America’s most useful and respected dictionary, optimized for your Android device. Continuously updated with the newest words and meanings, this is the premier Android app for English language reference, education, and vocabulary building.

And now we’ve added new word games! It’s never been more fun to learn new words and test your vocabulary for everyone from English learners to total word nerds.

The app is free, and supported by ads. To remove ads, a subscription is available.

Offline access: You’ll have complete access to definitions and synonyms whether or not you’re connected. You will need a connection to view illustrations, hear audio pronunciations, and use voice search.

Features:
* New Vocabulary-Building Quizzes: fun, fast quizzes to learn new words or test your vocabulary
* Additional vocabulary-building resources available with in-app purchase
* Voice Search: look up a word without having to spell it
* Word of the Day: learn a new word every day
* Integrated Thesaurus: more than 200,000 word choices with examples of their use
* Example Sentences: understand how a word is used in context
* Audio Pronunciations: voiced by real English speakers, not text-to-speech robots
* Favorite Words and Search History: keep track of the words that are most important to you
* Favorite Word Syncing: share your favorites between devices
* For Tablets: browse the entire dictionary with a scrolling index

Ratings and reviews

It's actually impressive in a way that this company was able to take something so incredibly straightforward (a dictionary) and make it ridiculously annoying and difficult to use. The ads are intrusive and repetitive (and for some reason in spanish) and the fact that nearly every word on every page is hyperlinked with no return button makes reading entries feel like a minefield. Just finding a word and scrolling down through the definition is a struggle.

The UI is terrible and makes the app extremely frustrating to use. To scroll up/down on a page, you must very consciously only touch white space because there are so many hyperlinked words. If you accidentally touch a hyperlink it takes you to that word's page. Pressing the back button takes you to the home page, not back to the previous word, so now you have to search the word all over again. For words with long entries, this sequence can happen multiple times as you scroll the page.

The app is ok, but the subscription process is deceptive. After subscribing (which apparently is their dictionary 'lite', which I didn't know because it didn't communicate that), the first word I looked up to check etymology was gibbus, which shows up in the list. I click the word and it's not in the dictionary, but I can pay AGAIN to get words that should already have been in the dictionary in the first place. Plus, no CS contact.

What's new

Bug fixes and other small tweaks.