Swedish online dictionaries and lexical resources
The classical Svenska Akademiens ordlista, aka SAOL, used by all Swedes, is a spelling wordlist that only has definitions of words that may be unknown to a native speaker. This is the best wordlist if you're looking for the correct spelling or want to know the forms of a word.
The Swedish dictionary which has the best definitions (in Swedish) is Svensk ordbok. It is now available as an app for both iPhone and Android. Link Not free, but very good.
Lexin is an online dictionary made mainly for immigrants. It has sound files for many words, read by native speakers. Click the word lyssna example here. This dictionary also has ”picture themes” – pictures of stuff, collected in themes like "City and traffic" with words and their sounds. These are here. In the top left menu that says Svenska, you can choose languages like Albanian, Finnish, Russian, Greek or Spanish, to see the same pictures with words and sounds in those languages instead. Could be useful for Swedes learning other languages!
Folkets lexikon The above mentioned Lexin is no longer maintained for English, but they still provide this version of it, which is originally based on research, and then enhanced by crowdsourcing, if I understand it correctly.
Svenska Akademiens ordbok (SAOB, not to be confused with SAOL) is a historical dictionary. The first volume was printed in 1893 but they're not finished yet (they're close to the end of T)! This dictionary is good if you're interested in when a word first appeared in the Swedish language, or how it was spelled and used historically. Only for very advanced learners.
Svensk etymologisk ordbok If you're interested in etymology (the origin of words), this is what you're looking for.
Wiktionary is like Wikipedia, but for languages. You can become a contributor too. This dictionary often has conjugation tables and sentence examples, sometimes translations too. If the word is in Wiktionary in another language, a link on the left side will take you there. Depending on what your native language is and how good that Wiktionary is, it may be very useful to you. If it's not that good, you might want to improve it.
Wikipedia For words that denote things, Wikipedia is a really good resource. Look up the word in Swedish, then go to View in another language (or Språk), and click on your language. Does not work for all words, but for the kind of stuff that has Wikipedia articles, this is great. You'll learn a lot too.
Ord.se – look up words and get English translations and sometimes phrases. This is based on Norstedts Swedish-English dictionary, which is very good. wordfinderonline.se seems to use the same database.
The People’s Dictionary is a crowdsourced online dictionary.
bab.la is an online dictionary with sound files and English translations. The best part is the example collection though, more about that below.
tyda.se is another online dictionary. It often gives a lot of synonyms, but not much else. Edit: many learners like this one.
Woxikon – gives translations into many languages.
synonymer.se the name says it all – synonyms.
Svensk-engelsk ordbok för den högre utbildningen Looking for terms related to higher education? Here's your dictionary.
KARP If you're seriously interested in lexicology and want to be able to search many dictionaries at the same time, this is your new home online. For nerds only.
Forvo is an online pronouncing dictionary with words read by native speakers. Very useful.
Resources to see the language in action:
Korp is a huge collection of Swedish corpora (text collections). You can choose which corpora to search. There are lots of options for the advanced user. For a beginner it is still interesting just to type in a word and look at what sentences come up.
bab.la is a large collection of real-life translations. These can be very useful, but remember they are not checked by a human eye. Some translations are just wrong. However, the site can be useful to get an idea of how the language is used. Most translations seem to be from EU contexts. There's a dictionary part too.
linguee.com is also a large, searchable collection of real-life translations.
Smartphone/tablet apps:
Svenska Akademiens ordlista (see above) is available as a free app for Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7, and Symbian. If you've got a smartphone, you should have this app.
bab.la (see above) also has a free app.
The dictionary apps from Norstedts are good, but expensive. See further comment from antspants01 on this page about them.
There is now an app for Svensk ordbok available both for iPhone and Android. Not free, but this is the best monolingual Swedish definition dictionary you can find imho.
Here's a link to an overview of 150+ apps for people (anyone from children to immigrants) who are learning Swedish: http://www.pappasappar.se/svenska-sprakappar/
If you've know about other online dictionaries, please comment. I'll edit this text to add your suggestions.
-Arnauti
Excellent list! Do note, however, that the etymological dictionary available online is a digitalisation of the first edition, which may contain errors. Later editions are still under copyright.
For some true ”överkurs” my favourite dictionary, "Glossarium öfver föråldrade eller ovanliga ord och talesätt” is also to be found online: http://runeberg.org/ovanliga/
There are more old dictionaries here: http://litteraturbanken.se/#!/om/hjalp?ankare=Ordb%C3%B6cker
And there are of course errors in all the crowdsourced dictionaries above. I've also spotted a few in Lexin.
Hmmm... I should really look through my old Svenska för Invandrare/Svenska som andra språk stuff for some of the online resources. Off the top of my head Safir (http://www.digitalasparet.se/safir/startsida.htm) might be a good complement to what exists here.
a very nice dictionary app and free for Android phones is Folkets https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.air.com.fiddleapps.FolketsOrdbokhl=en
A useful function it has and also that bab.la nice iPhone app has is "history" of things you look up. I find this terribly useful. Both offline-ready which is more useful.
Another app solution that is good is for Kindle (or e-readers) - on Amazon there wasa very cheap Swedish English dictionary and also a free one I found somewhere - I forget where. Handy if you are reading on kindle at least and no wifi. I find I use dictionary most when I am not data connected, otherwise I settle for Google Translate as it is so versatile.
Wiktionary has always been fantastic for me. The quality of Finnish words is amazing (individual pages for most common forms of each word). Usually the translations of Swedish words are present with complete inflection tables which is immensely helpful. The fact that it's free is pretty fantastic as well.
svenska.se is really great. There you can search SO, SAOL and SAOB simultaneously. Note that all of these are Swedish-Swedish dictionaries, but once your Swedish is up to it, I highly recommend using them. (Especially SO, which is also available as app. In the past the app cost like 50 SEK, which it's definitely worth, but now it seems to be available for free.)
The Nordstedts dictionary apps are very conveniently split up into several. If you're wanting something like the Collins Complete Unabridged German app with all its features you'll be fairly disappointed. One dictionary had noun endings for definite singular and definite plural, another has pronunciation of Swedish verbs and another had some different feature that I can't remember off the top of my head. To be honest, they could have easily fit all those features into one app but they don't. After seeing all these links it looks like there's a plethora of free options so now I won't have to spend a fortune!
Another link is the dic.cc site and app. Though the Swedish database is much smaller than the German one there's some phrases in there that I didn't find on bab.la.
Tack :p
You mean dict.cc, don't you?
Another useful resource is linguee.com. This is a searchable database of "hundreds of millions" of human-translated texts (most from the EU it seems). I've used it a lot for French/English, but Swedish is there too. The big advantage over dictionaries and machine-translation sites is the ability to see several real-world translations of words and phrases in context. Translation quality can vary though.
I'm a Swedish English bilingual speaker (live in new zealand) and I only ever use tyda.se it's quick and easy and as you type it gives suggestions in both English and Swedish
My Swedish teacher recommand us http://ungafakta.se . That is a webpage for children, so you get a lot of easy to read texts of different subjects. Probably a good start for reading texts and to pick new words to improve one's vocabulary.