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:

www.m-w.com/netdict.htm

Merriam-Website’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10^th 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.

www.xrefer.com

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.

www.yourdictionary.com/

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.

www.oed.com/

Oxford English Dictionary

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

www.plainenglish.com

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.

www.worldwidewords.org

World Wide Words

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

www.foreignword.com

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

www.wordwizard.com

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

www.thesaurus.com

Roget’s Thesaurus

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

www.dictionary.com

An online dictionary and thesaurus.

www.ask.elibrary.com

A comprehensive digital archive for information seekers.

-Swapan-