My Dictionary Recommandations

As you know, it's best to start looking at definitions instead of translations as soon as you can. This will really help you improve. Luckily, we have many learner's dictionaries in English (which I didn't have when learning French!) to help make it easy and start the habit of using definitions. 

My go-to dictionary: Merriam-Webster

It's simply the one I grew up with at home, and it's American. This is good for advanced learners, as the definitions aren't always easy. 

Cambridge Dictionary 

So what's cool about this dictionary is that it tells you the level of the word you're searching. It also tells you how to use it. For example with the verb "want", it tells you you need an infinitive after, which is really useful.

You can also choose to use the Learner's Dictionary if you prefer (not too different) and additionally, if you don't understand the definition, they have and ENG→FR or FR→ENG dictionary as well. 

They also have the Essential American English Dictionary and its British equivalent. "The Cambridge Essential American English Dictionary is ideal for learners of English who want to build confidence in using an English-only dictionary. It has the words, phrases, and collocations that beginning learners of American English need to know, with easy-to-understand definitions and audio pronunciations, and thousands of carefully chosen example sentences" "It includes all the vocabulary that students need to know at CEFR A1–B1"

Oxford Dictionary 

Has only a learner's dictionary available for free. It may be more complete than the one from Cambridge. It also has grammar explanations. Little reminder I got while reading their site, the English language has over 600,000 words! (But don't panic, remember, you already know ~40% of them! That's 240,000! This is indeed a large estimate.. but still)

Wiktionary

Works for many languages and it's a useful dictionary that informs you on etymology as well which can be quite interesting and insightful, specially when you see links to French!

Collins

I mostly use this one for contextualized translations. I prefer it to Linguee or Reverso, which sometimes takes badly translated texts from websites as examples. It is not super complete, though.

What do recommendations do you have? What do you think of these? Do you have any preferences?