Online Dictionaries and Other Writing Resources

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.

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