A picture dictionary is a dictionary that uses photos or drawings to illustrate what the headwords mean. Picture dictionaries are useful in a variety of teaching environments, such as teaching a young child about their native language, and in foreign language instruction for children and adults such as the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon. Picture dictionaries are often organized by topic instead of being an alphabetic list of words. Picture dictionaries are almost always minimizing dictionaries, and only include a small corpus of words.

A similar but distinct concept is the visual dictionary. A picture dictionary is usually made up of a set of basic vocabulary. A visual dictionary attempts to be a complete dictionary with an alphabetized index allowing you to find an illustration. In that illustration you can find the specific word you are looking for.