This Web site takes visitors to the American Heritage Book of English Usage, which is a guide to current problems and debates in English language usage that will be valuable for native and non-native speakers alike. The work may be searched by keyword, or users may elect to browse through its 10 chapters. The subjects covered by the various chapters include gender, science terms, e-mail, word...

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary is available for searching on the web. Each retrieved word is accompanied by pronunciation, usage, grammatical function, a brief etymology, and of course, definition. A thesaurus can be queried for similar words, hypertext cross references are available, misspellings return suggested spellings, and there are hypertext links to illustrations. The search system supports...

In the tradition of that great lover of words, Samuel Johnson, Douglas Harper (an amateur etymologist) has compiled one of the first free online etymology dictionaries. The etymologies are compiled in alphabetical order and parsed into smaller sections for easy viewing. As Mr. Harper notes in the introduction to the dictionary, "Think of it like looking at pictures of your friends' parents when...

More than a simple online dictionary, the Oxford Dictionaries website includes a number of features that will appeal to writers, writing instructors, and word-lovers of all sorts. For one, this is a "living dictionary," providing helpful information about the origins of words and noting how the colloquial uses of certain words have shifted over time. For example, the entry for nonplussed notes...

On Tuesday, the Oxford University Press placed the world's most famous dictionary, the OED, on the Web. Individual and institutional subscribers will now have online access to what is indisputably the most authoritative and historical dictionary of the English language. In addition, the editors have announced plans to use the online version for the first comprehensive revision of the twenty-volume...

First published in complete form in 1906, The Devil's Dictionary was written by Ambrose Bierce, a prominent man of letters and general curmudgeon, and an individual who is perhaps best remembered for both his short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and The Devil's Dictionary. This complete version of The Devil's Dictionary was placed online by Mike Leung, and contains the famous entries...

Edited by Ian Lancashire of the Department of English at the University of Toronto this online database offers access to 127,000 word-entries from eleven dictionaries from 1530 to 1657. Several search options are available and users may select individual dictionaries or all of them. Additional resources at the site include a helpful overview of EMEDD, a short piece on Renaissance word-meaning, a...

The Straight Dope: What Does "OK" stand for? http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/503/what-does-ok-stand-for Linguistically, America is A-OK http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/29/AR2010102907644.html The 'O' Word http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/books/review/Blount-t.html?src=me American Languages: Our Nation's Many...

This site contains pointers to dictionaries in over 130 languages, many of them bilingual (English and the language of the dictionary). Included are "artificial" languages such as Esperanto and three different fictional languages from the Star Trek TV show. All levity aside, this extremely useful site offers multilingual and specialized dictionaries, thesauri, vocabulary aids, and a...