I first wrote about the Italian bilingual and monolingual dictionaries available online some eighteen years ago. Since, however, such links are liable to change, with old sites disappearing and new ones taking their place, below is an up-to-date list of sites that offer English-Italian, Italian monolingual, and other Italian bilingual dictionaries.
- Picchi’s English-Italian dictionary (published by Hoepli) is available for free from La Repubblica website: Dizionari - La Repubblica. The same site also offers the Grande Dizionario di Italiano Hoepli and Hoepli’s Dizionario dei sinonimi.
- The current incarnation of the excellent Sansoni English-Italian dictionary (published by Rizzoli) is available online at the Corriere della Sera website: Dizionari e Traduttori - Corriere della Sera. The same web page also offers several other Italian monolingual dictionaries, like the Dizionario dei modi di dire and a Dizionario di citazioni, and Italian-Spanish, Italian-French and Italian-German and Latin-Italian bilingual dictionaries.
- The venerable Hazon English-Italian dictionary is available from the Garzanti website: Garzanti Linguistica, where you can also find Garzanti’s Italian monolingual dictionary and an Italian-French bilingual dictionary.
- The English-Italian bilingual dictionary I’m currently using most often is Ragazzini’s. You can subscribe to it on Zanichelli’s site (Dizionari online Zanichelli). From the same site you can subscribe to several other dictionaries, including Zingarelli (Italian monolingual), several specialized English-Italian bilingual dictionaries, and other bilingual dictionaries including Italian-Spanish, Italian-French, Italian-German, Italian-Russian, Italian-Arabic, Italian-Modern Greek, Italian-Chinese and Italian Japanese.
- Oxford-Paravia Concise English-Italian dictionary is available as a (paid) subscription from the MobySystems website.
- WordReference.com offers free access to a useful English-Italian dictionary, as well as several other online dictionaries.
- The eLexico.com website offers a wide range of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, either via online subscriptions (generally more expensive than those available from Zanichelli), downloadable installable dictionaries, or both things combined. Among the dictionaries downloadable from eLexico.com are Picchi, Sansoni, and many others; unfortunately, the excellent Italian monolingual Devoto-Oli is no longer available for individual subscription, though it is offered for multi-user subscriptions.
- While the bilingual dictionaries offered by eLexico include Marolli’s Grande Dizionario Tecnico Inglese, it is cheaper to buy it as a Windows app from this link.
- Lexicool.com lets the user search many dictionaries. You can find Italian-English bilingual dictionaries, as well as many other linguistical resources.
- The Treccani website offers access to the Enciclopedia italiana online, to the Italian language Vocabolario, and to a good Italian synonyms dictionary.
- Il Nuovo De Mauro is a very useful Italian monolingual dictionary and can be consulted for free online.
- Francesco Urzì’s indispensable Dizionario delle Combinazioni Lessicali is available as a (paid) online resource.
- Finally, for those of us who try to resist the tide of useless, redundant (and often misleading and incorrect) anglicisms in Italian, Antonio Zoppetti offers il dizionario delle Alternative agli Anglicismi, significati e sinonimi in italiano.