A few years ago most students would own a bilingual dictionary and sometimes an English-English dictionary. Today you can find definitions on your mobile phone or tablet.

www.wordreference.com is a great website where you can get translations of words into English and also translations of other languages into English.

There is a wide choice of online dictionaries but make sure you know how to use them. Often they will give you the sound and the phonetic spelling of a word and some dictionaries will give you a list of similar words.

However an old-fashioned dictionary can still be useful when you want to get more detail of the use and grammar of words. This is particularly true with phrasal verbs starting with for example ‘put’, ‘make’ or ‘get’:

• put up – my father put up the money for the deposit (supplied)
• make off – the thief made off with her handbag (stole)
• get by – she gets by on £60 per week (manages/survives)