Online dictionaries greatly facilitate and accelerate the translation process. One of their advantages is that they’re accessible via computer or a smartphone, so that no one must carry heavy dictionaries with them and that a search in a dictionary is accelerated because it’s enough to enter the wanted term and the online dictionary finds the required record in no time. For the purpose of getting acquainted with the most commonly used online dictionaries for the German-Croatian language pair, a structured review of the existing online dictionaries, as well as the historical development of physical and digital dictionaries, is provided in this paper. Apart from online dictionaries such as Duden and Hrvatski jezični portal, the most famous terminological portals and digital corpuses for German and Croatian were also analyzed, e.g. Hrvatski terminološki portal, DIN-TERM Online and DWDS. A study was carried out on German students from the Universities of Zagreb, Rijeka and Osijek with the purpose to obtaine a review of the preferences for dictionary usage of the reference population, which most often use online dictionaries. The results are described in detail and interpreted and divided into four groups, which are general questions about the frequency and purpose of using physical and digital dictionaries, online dictionaries and digital corpuses in use, the essential features of the structure and layout of the website, and in the end the students gave their opinion on whether one day physical dictionaries will vanish and digital dictionaries will be used. According to the responses about the most important characteristics of online dictionaries, which are transparency, logic and simplicity, a visual example of a web site that meets these criteria was created.