Thursday, November 14, 2013

Useful World Famous Dictionaries and Thesaurus Websites!





Everyone who writes needs to use a dictionary or thesaurus from time to time – or at least they should. If you try doing a search on any search engine for ‘dictionary’ you will see that are actually hundreds and hundreds of different sites.

Here are my tips for some interesting and useful online dictionaries and language resources on the Internet:

Merriam-Website’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition
Free dictionary and thesaurus, including an online audible pronunciation database.

www.one-look.com
One-Look Dictionary Search
Called the ‘Faster Finder’, this claims to search 700+ online dictionaries simultaneously with a total word count of over 4 million.

Xrfer Search Engine
Xrefer’s free site contains encyclopedias, dictionaries thesauri and books of quotations from the world’s leading publishers. All cross-references, all in one place, providing a single information source.

yourDictionary.com Portal
This claims to be the most comprehensive and authoritative portal for language and language-related products and service on the Internet, with more than 1800 dictionaries for over 250 languages.

Oxford English Dictionary
An expensive subscription service, but some background documents and a Word of the Day are free.

Plain English Campaign
This is an independent pressure group fighting for public information to be written in plain English. The site includes useful examples of what is and what is not ‘plain English’, free guides and much more.

World Wide Words
This is a fascinating list of English words and phrases, giving not only their meanings but how they came about.

This is a link hundreds of online dictionaries and translation engines, and thousands of specialized glossaries.

A portal for word lovers. Learn about word meanings, slang, quotations, insults, famous authors. Wordwizard offers a round trip across the English language.

Roget’s Thesaurus
An online version of Roget’s Thesaurus of English words and phrases.

An online dictionary and thesaurus.

A comprehensive digital archive for information seekers.

-Swapan-