Here are some great online dictionaries, as well as other writing resources.
Note: If you don’t find what you’re looking for in this section, make sure you go to Writing-Related Internet Sites for a complete selection of Web-based writing resources.
- Almanac.com: from The Old Farmer’s Almanac.
- The Alternative Dictionaries.
- Academic Info: An annotated listing of the best general Internet sites in numerous fields, as well as a gateway to more advanced research.
- Acronym Finder: A searchable database containing common acronyms and abbreviations about all subjects, with a focus on computers, technology, telecommunications, and the military.
- Alexandria Digital Literature: Offers readers the ability to immediately download out-of-print, hard to find short stories, novellas, and full length novels from leading science fiction and fantasy writers.
- BookSpot: The best of book reviews, book stores, reading lists, and more.
- Calendar Zone: Comprehensive categorized calendar catalog.
- CyberStacks(sm): A centralized, integrated, and unified collection of significant World Wide Web and other Internet resources categorized using the Library of Congress classification scheme.
- Dictionary.com: Easy definitions.
- Education Review: Publishes review articles of recently published books in education.
- Familiar Quotations: John Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (9th ed.), with full search capabilities.
- Famous Quotes and Quotations: A collection of quotes links.
- Finding Data on the Internet: Find the information you’re looking for by finding the links at this site.
- Global Research: Resource center for magazines, libraries, newpapers and search engines.
- Guides for Better Science Research and Writing: Contains a fairly lengthy bibliography of style guides in print for writing in biology, chemistry, engineering, geology, and math.
- Handbook of Terms for Discussing Poetry: Contains information for analyzing poetry, including poetic types and genres.
- High School Hub: A great collection of resources for high school students.
- Homework Resources for Teenagers: Lots of great reference material and tools.
- Internet for College Research: Some great links can be found on this course from Terry Dugas.
- LibrarySpot: The best fo libraries, newspapers, encyclopedias, maps, and more.
- Literary Index: Provides both an overview and a review of the major collections of websites of interest to scholars, students, and lovers of literature.
- Merriam-Webster OnLine: Look up a definition, pronunciation, etymology, spelling, or usage point in the WWWebster Dictionary.
- My Virtual Reference Desk: A great and well-organized collection of reference material links.
- Needle in a CyberStack — the InfoFinder: a great collection of Web resources for those needing help doing research.
- Net Lingo: The Internet Language Dictionary: Online dictionary contains definitions of hundreds of words that are emerging as a new vocabulary surrounding the technology and community of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
- OneLook Dictionaries: more than 3 millions words in in more than 600 dictionaries currently indexed.
- Phrase Finder: Excellent. Give it a single word and it will give you a list of phrases and sayings that are related to the word in some way.
- Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus: Accesses data from the WordNet database, a publicly available resource developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University. This database, first created in 1985 as a dictionary based on psycholinguistic theories, contains over 50,000 words and 40,000 phrases collected into more than 70,000 sense meanings.
- Quotations Page. Find all sorts of quotes.
- Ready Reference Using the Internet: Consists, with a few exceptions, of full-text sources and data suitable for ready reference.
- Research Methods Knowledge Base: A comprehensive web-based textbook that addresses all of the topics in a typical introductory undergraduate or graduate course in social research methods.
- Researchpaper.com: Everything you need for writing a research paper including an idea directory, strategies and tips for getting started and a discussion area to trade ideas with other students. Web address:
- Resources for Graduate Students: Offers advice to graduated students conducting research on the Internet about search engines, searching techniques, managing the dissertation process, finding a topic, preparing a proposal, form and style manuals, exemplary research studies and electronic journals.
- RhymeZone. — use it to find rhymes, synonyms, definitions, and more.
- Robin’s Nest: a great collection of writer’s links — all in one location.
- Roget’s Thesaurus: The ARTFL Project Roget’s Thesaurus allows searches of headwords or full text of Roget’s Thesaurus (version 1.02), released to the public domain by MICRA and the Gutenberg Project.
- Scholar’s Guide to WWW: a well-organized directory of helpful references and resources.
- Strunk’s Elements of Style.
- Thesaurus.com: Easy index and word locator.
- Virtual Reference Sites: Links to more than 2,500 of the most popular references site on the Net.
- A Web of On-Line Dictionaries: Dictionaries, grammars, linguistics, morphology …. links to more than 400 dictionaries in more than 130 languages.
- Writers Free Reference: This is a list of free reference sites useful to writers.
- Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus: Billed as “the ONLY integrated English dictionary and thesaurus in electronic form.”
- WWWebster Dictionary: From Merriam-Webster.