Standing as a testament to the wide ranging contributions of the Jewish people to world culture and history, this Web site contains the complete contents of the massive 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, originally published between 1901-1906 by the Funk & Wagnall's Company. Conceived and funded by the Kopelman Foundation, this compilation is the only free encyclopedia of Judaica available on the...

NatureServe Explorer is "a source for authoritative conservation information on more than 50,000 plants, animals, and ecological communities of the United States and Canada." NatureServe Explorer offers a quick and convenient way to get detailed information on the conservation status, geographic distribution, taxonomy, and natural history for species of interest. NatureServe Explorer, a combined...

"A search engine for words," OneLook Dictionaries contains over 4 million words indexed in more than 700 online dictionaries. Whether you’re looking for a definition or translation, OneLook will provide a list of Web dictionaries that can answer the questions you’re seeking. Equally important, for those rare occasions when the spelling of a word is unknown, OneLook allows you to type in a pattern...

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...

Widely considered to be one of the crowning achievements of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert in the 18th century has proved to be fertile ground for those who have sought to classify and chronicle the various branches of knowledge. This highly ambitious project was published during the period 1751 to 1777, and included 32 volumes amply...

This 1881 reference book was designed to help nineteenth-century households stay healthy and productive. Need to know how to winter your bees? Build a barometer? Bleed a patient with leeches? Your answers are here. The site, a part-time project of freelance webmaster Matthew Spong, evokes a time when many households were largely self-sufficient, and the value of a book explaining how to amputate a...

Relaunched with a new search engine and other new features in July, Wordsmyth: The Educational Dictionary-Thesaurus (WEDT) touts itself as "the premier online American English dictionary with an integrated thesaurus." WEDT contains 50,000 headwords and well-defined and hyperlinked synonyms. The site offers multiple search strategies for different purposes allowing users to perform narrow or...

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...