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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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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Fowler's Modern English Usage (original book or the second edition edited by Sir Ernest Gowers) is fun to read and educational. I don't recommend the new edition. |
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Practical English Usage by Michael Swan is very handy if you need to justify edits to a non-native speaker. |
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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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TheFreeDictionary.com used with the print layout is the currently the fastest online dictionary. It is easy to configure it to be your word search engine in Chrome & Opera so that you don't have to type the entire URL every time you want to search the meaning of a word or phrase. |
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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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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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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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Chambers Dictionary, famous for its humorous definitions. |
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I find WordWeb invaluable The software has a full dictionary and thesaurus for American, British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, and global English. It also provides synonyms, antonyms, related words, text & audio pronunciations for words you look up. |
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Well, the companion to Dictionary.com is Thesaurus.com. |
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English Grammar in Use by Raymond Murphy is very nice for ESL. |
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Microsoft Word's autocorrecter, grammar checker, and spelling checker |
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I have a minor addiction to looking up synonyms. My condition led to the creation of a Google gadget which I will now shamelessly plug in the Google Gadget directory. |
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Etymonline is an online Etmological dictionary, very handy for tracing the origins of words. Unfortunately it tends to be very terse, sometimes to the point of ambiguity. |
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Chicago Manual of Style is really useful, especially looking at the example sentences of correctly-typeset English. |
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An invaluable and up-to-date resource for looking up slang and other words that are often absent in conventional dictionaries. |
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Not Google Books, Language Tools, or even word trends. I mean the search engine. If I am curious about a sentence or spelling, I search for it. If the search returns interesting results similar to what I'm writing about, the sentence was good. If it returns badly-spelled pages about unrelated topics, the sentence is no good. |
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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a very valuable and rich resource. When you look up a word, for example, favorite, it provides a comprehensive account of use, history, synonyms, etc. Note that unlike many free resources in this list, the OED requires a monthly or yearly subscription. However, your library may subscribe and this would allow you to access the OED for free. |
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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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Project Gutenberg has tens of thousands of free ebooks. Useful for looking up old and classic texts. |
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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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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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Google word translation The translation is displayed in a tooltip after you position the mouse pointer over a word. The Google Toolbar includes this feature. |
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This site allows searching of two- to eight-word phrases from the British National Corpus. |
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