We’re long past the days when one would carry a pocket Italian dictionary around in the streets of Naples, or heft a desk volume off the shelves to help with our Italian studies. There are plenty of excellent English-Italian reference works available for Android and iOS platforms that can help solve your queries without weighing you down.
Check out my recommendations of the best Italian dictionary apps out there, so you’re set for a range of different situations.
This is a very complete, online-only tool for looking up Italian words and phrases.
Upon looking up an adjective like “lazy,” you get the main translation pigro, but below that a number of alternate words that you might use if you’re talking about the lazy flow of a river, a lazy summer afternoon, a lazy job on something, a lazy eye, and so on—with the context explained for each.
If that’s not enough, the app also gives you access to WordReference’s celebrated and very useful English-Italian forum, where it seems that idle translators hang out just for the thrill of solving conundrums like how one might handle “lazy bum” or “it’s a lazy day.” If you make a free account, you can pose your own questions or help others with their queries.
Also useful for learners are the provided Italian verb conjugations and the links to Google Image searches of the word at the bottom of each definition.
Yes, this is a translation app: It can do Italian-English translations of typed text, photos of text and the spoken word. But it also functions as a very decent dictionary!
Look up a common verb like affittare and you’ll get the basic English translation “rent,” but below that you’ll also see another handful of other options (“hire,” “lease,” etc.) and various translations for each one of those back into Italian.
This app beats out many other dictionary apps in its ability to handle your misspellings and take you straight to the information you want, without even pausing to ask you if you really meant affittare instead of affitare, for example.
You can choose to save Italian and English to your device and use this as an entirely offline application. Voice recognition doesn’t work offline for the iOS version, however.
3. Best For Language Learning Features: Oxford-Paravia Italian Dictionary
This monster dictionary claims to have 450,000 total translations for 300,000 words and phrases. The trial version is online-only, after purchasing the full version, you can use it offline. Like WordReference, it gives a number of translation ideas for a word like “lazy,” although not quite as many.
The app offers guesses as to what you meant by misspellings, although it’s not quite as intuitive as WordReference or Google Translate. Still, it provides careful usage guidance and some definitions and uses that you won’t find elsewhere.
Several features aimed at language learners are included in the app—such as a collection of most frequently used words in Italian, verb tables, and topic-based vocabulary lists.
The iOS version of the app contains a bundle of Oxford dictionaries, with the Paravia Italian Dictionary among them.
Dictionary Linguee is free and available in offline mode. It features audio recordings for each word, so you can check the correct pronunciation of the word along with the meaning.
The app provides translations almost instantly, offering possibilities after only a few letters have been typed. It translates simultaneously between English and Italian, showing translations in both languages at once.
One of the interesting things about this app is that it doesn’t just include sample sentences: The dictionary pulls actual examples of the words in use from reputable sources around the web, enabling learners to see the word used in a real-life context.
5. Best For Smart Search: Collins Italian Dictionary
This paid app is a collaboration between Ultra Lingua and Harper Collins. Both are leaders in the language field, so you can be sure of the quality and accuracy of the definitions!
You’ll find more than 70,000 entries here, including phrases, idioms and slang as well as mainstream vocabulary; all accessible offline. The dictionary also has a smart search feature, helping you to find a word even if you misspell it.
The app also comes with complete conjugation lists for verbs, as well as usage notes and examples for more complex words and phrases. Where applicable, this dictionary highlights regional variations, which is exceedingly helpful given the variety of Italian dialects in use across the country.
6. Best For Custom Lists: Audio Collins Mini Gem English-Italian Dictionary by MobiSystems, Inc.
This app is free for the first 30 days and can function offline.
It offers translations of words and there’s some usage guidance for those learning English, but not for those learning Italian, so you have to reverse-engineer to get something out of that. There are, however, pronunciations of the Italian words (when connected to the Internet).
For language learners, the app offers the option to create custom lists of words and a word of the day feature that helps you discover new vocabulary.
Thanks to smart search tools, the app searches for words as you type, so you may not have to finish typing a word in order to see it pop up. You also don’t need to get the spelling completely right each time: The app comes with a filter to automatically correct spelling.
7. Best For Simple Interface: Italian-English dictionary by AllDict
This app provides a simple interface for translations for any word offline. It gives a number of simple definitions but without context or usage guidelines, so you may not necessarily know which word choice is most appropriate in a given situation. Click on any of them to hear how they sound in Italian (this function only works if you’re online, though).
An interesting aspect for language learners is that you can create custom lists of words you want to learn. The app will then generate listening, writing and translation exercises based on your lists to help you broaden your Italian vocabulary.
8. Best For Monolingual Dictionary: Italian Dictionary Offline
This free app is based on the online resource Wiktionary, bringing its 69,000+ words offline for easy reference anywhere, anytime. Alongside enabling you to look up word definitions, the app also encourages the learning of new vocabulary with its random search option. Great for discovering and memorizing new words!
The only issue to keep in mind is that it’s a monolingual dictionary—it’s entirely in Italian, with no English translations. This makes it the perfect offline resource for advanced learners, unafraid to tackle Italian definitions.
The app comes with a surprising amount of visual customization options—you can change the appearance of most interfaces to suit your preferences.
To optimize your dictionary-based studies, it’s recommended that you combine these apps with other downloadable language learning programs. That way, you can see in real contexts the words you look up and understand how to use them in conversation. Many programs can also include dictionary-like functions to make the learning process more seamless.
For example, FluentU lets you learn with engaging Italian videos enhanced with interactive subtitles.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
Whether you’re on a dusty mountain road in Italy or at home in a hammock with a great piece of Italian literature, these tools should allow you to look up just about anything you need.
The best Italian dictionary apps are meant to let you dive in quickly for what you need, and then hop back out into your life and put those words to use.
Take the above for a spin and see how they revolutionize your life as an Italian learner!
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Learn Italian with funny commericals, documentary excerpts and web series, as you can see here:
FluentU helps you get comfortable with everyday Italian by combining all the benefits of complete immersion and native-level conversations with interactive subtitles. Tap on any word to instantly see an image, in-context definition, example sentences and other videos in which the word is used.
Access a complete interactive transcript of every video under the Dialogue tab, and review words and phrases with convenient audio clips under Vocab.
Once you've watched a video, you can use FluentU's quizzes to actively practice all the vocabulary in that video. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you’re on.
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