This will prevent myself from asking an obvious, silly question again. What are the English language tools you found most useful?
I found Corpus Concordance English extremely useful for looking up collocations.
Please, one tool per answer.
Tell me more
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closed as off topic by RegDwighт♦ Jul 25 '12 at 19:36
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This thread has some really good online resources. It would be convenient if one could reference the bulk of them in just one place: a page of favorite links ~ an online wordsmithery of sorts. |
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Google Dictionary by Google is a Chrome browser extension that allows you to look up the definition of a word by just double-clicking it. (There is a similar plugin for Firefox as well.) After double-clicking any word you get a quick pop-up definition with an icon to hear the word pronounced. It also translates foreign words and supports the following dictionaries:
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Google Books is useful for searching for real usage and etymology of words and phrases, and for antecedents. However, care must be taken with metadata, especially when only a snippet is shown: occasionally the book was published later than the the year Google claims it was, and sometimes they accidentally include multiple books for each record. Therefore it's important to double check the date: scroll up to confirm the real date for "full view" books, and for preview/"snippet view" verify with another source (such as the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg). |
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Chambers Dictionary, famous for its humorous definitions. |
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I'm an English as a Second/Foreign Language teacher and I like to use the Cambridge Dictionaries Online. It has different levels of definitions from Learner's (which used to be basic or beginner) to Advanced Learner's. I find it's not only helpful for me when I need to find a way to define a word for a student, but it also helps me to understand words I may have never seen before or don't often use. They also have some mobile apps for English students, and a blog that posts about new words in English like lactivism and lets you comment about them. |
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The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, from the publishers of the OED, is one of my favorite dictionaries. It has entries written using the Oxford 3000 keywords, so they're easy to understand, suitable for learners and experts alike. Each entry includes British and American English audio and an IPA pronunciation key. The example sentences and usage notes are great. For focusing on American English, the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary is also now available, which includes essentially the same information and features as the American English parts of the OALD entries. |
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Word Dynamo from Dictionary.com is a nice way to learn new vocabulary. It has flashcard sets of a variety of different topics. |
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The Internet Archive's Text Archive has old books and journals in many formats, including plain text and scanned. Useful for confirming things only available as snippets in Google Books. |
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manythings.org is an online "dictionary" which can help you memorize words which are listed according to their frequency. |
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The Usenet archive at Google Groups is useful for searching for Internet slang dating back to 1981. Be careful as there's no way to search only Usenet, and some of the non-Usenet results are misdated, but it can sometimes be useful. |
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