Dictionaries

Pons.Eu

  • Bilingual Dictionary En-De.

Dictionary.com

  • Monolingual multi-source dictionary, primarily based on the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

Thesaurus.com

  • based on Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus
  • "The search for the mot juste is not a pedantic fad but a vital necessity. Words are our precision tools. Imprecision engenders ambiguity and hours are wasted in removing verbal misunderstandings before the argument of substance can begin.” — Anonymous Civil Servant

Oxford English Dictionary

  • Then when we go beyond them [the defining dictionaries] to the historical dictionaries ... we are quite beyond the range of the 'proper meaning.' We find a history and complexity of meanings; conscious changes, or consciously different uses; innovation, obsolence, specialization, extension, overlap, transfer; or changes which are masked by a nominal continuity so that words which seem to have been there for centuries, with continuous general meanings, have come in fact to express radically different or radically variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed meanings and implications of meaning. (Raymond Williams, Keywords)

Oxford Online: English Dictionaries and Thesauruses

  • Contains among other reference works, an Australian, Canadian and New Zealand English dictionary.

Australian National Dictionary

  • Free online version of the OUP's Australian version of the Oxford English Dictionary

The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary

  •  Compiled at the New Zealand Dictionary Centre in Wellington, it reflects research into New Zealand words and their use, including new words, and new uses of older words that have evolved in New Zealand. 

Further Resources

TERMINOLOGY

InterActive Terminology for Europe (IATE)

  • The IATE database offers translations for technical terms in all EU languages.

UNITERM 

  • United Nations Multilingual Terminology Database

 

PORTALS

Oxford Online Language References (Client Software necessary)

  • e.g. Dictionaries of Abbreviations, English Etymology, English Grammar, English Idioms, Proverbs, Rhymes
  • Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage
  • Oxford Companion to the English Language
  • Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics

 

WORLD LANGUAGES

The Ethnologue

  • The purpose of the Ethnologue is to provide a comprehensive listing of the known living languages of the world it includes language maps.

 

OTHER DICTIONARIES

Digital Dictionaries of South Asia

  • English dictionaries of South Asian languages