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To prevent myself from asking an obvious, silly question multiple times: 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.

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    Mod note: This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. Ordinarily, we would lock such a question; however, because allowing the answers to be edited and voted on greatly enhances its value, we have chosen not to do so. Please do not vote to reopen or delete this question; such actions will be reversed.
    – waiwai933
    Commented Sep 17, 2012 at 0:54
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    More organized list on meta: List of general references.
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Jan 6, 2013 at 7:34
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    This chrome plugin is very useful. It's a good way to collect words. FlashRead : chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flashread/…
    – jack-london
    Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 6:35
  • I'm not sure why this isn't on Meta. Wasn't this on Meta?
    – Kit Z. Fox ♦
    Commented Aug 22, 2016 at 22:23
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    @KitZ.Fox please take into account that other SE sites allowed one cw question to collect resources. This helps to disallow daily questions on resources. E.g: chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/1120/…
    – stacker
    Commented Aug 23, 2016 at 6:14

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The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

This is a great tool for finding out how words are actually used in different registers of English, ranging from informal spoken English to formal academic written English. In this answer I used it to find out if the word prepone was used with any regularity in American English (it is not). In this answer, I used it to compare incidences of “an historic” with “a historic”, to see if one is used orders of magnitude more frequently than the other (almost four to one in favor of “a historic”).

It is also useful for researching collocates—which words frequently go with other words. For example, in this answer I used it to compare “on the bus” with “in the bus” (“in the bus” is used sometimes when the bus is stationary). In this answer I used it the part-of-speech searching ability to compare how frequently none was used with a singular and plural verb forms (two to one in favor of plural).

Overall, COCA is a very useful tool for researching how the language is actually used, not only for debunking myths about language, but also for learning something new about how the language works.

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Language Log

Language Log is a collaborative blog about language, most of whose contributors are academic linguists. It is one of the most popular blogs about linguistics, and there are often posts that directly address questions asked here. For example, there were a number of informative posts on singular they I linked to in this answer, and Mark Liberman’s post about the mythical rule forbidding beginning sentences with conjunctions was informative in this answer to the question “Why is it bad to start a sentence with and?”

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Wiktionary

It's great for a lot more than just definitions. It's usually the first place I go for looking up etymology, pronunciation, and often derivations/cognates of words.

The cross-connectedness of information in Wiktionary is really what sets it apart and makes it an excellent (if sometimes imperfect) resource.

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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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Google Books NGram Viewer

Google Books NGram Viewer displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the selected years.

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Google

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 Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage

This book, which can be read for free using Google Books, has a lot of useful usage information that is based on research into how words are actually used (as opposed to how some usage writer would like them to be used). Their commentary was helpful to me in this answer regarding less vs. fewer. It was also useful during my research for this answer regarding usage of the word myself in non-reflexive contexts.

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British National Corpus

The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written.

Also searchable with a less elaborate interface here.

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OneLook Reverse Dictionary

If you are looking for a word to express a given meaning, this is the place to go. For example, searching for "soul guide afterlife" returns "psychopomp", and searching for "fear long words" returns "hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia".

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Etymonline is an online Etymological 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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Forvo

This is a site for hearing pronunciations of words recorded by “ordinary” people. Many words have multiple recordings in different dialects, and each recording has votes on whether others think it is good or correct.

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Urban Dictionary

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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  • Urban Dictionary can be quite valuable, especially in deciphering colloquial English, but I would like to mention 2 things: (1) I'm a native speaker of American English, and on occasion I've found it difficult to find an answer that makes a lot of sense. This is not surprising as English is highly colloquial, but I can only imagine how difficult it may be at times for non-native speakers. Also, I've seen excellent answers that have tons of downvotes—unlike the SE sites where you see the net score, this may confuse. (2) Urban Dictionary should be considered NSFW.
    – Andy
    Commented Aug 29, 2012 at 16:00
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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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    Only if you're being paid to follow it.
    – John Lawler
    Commented May 18, 2012 at 18:48
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Word Net

It's a lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. These "synsets" are interlinked. It's more rigorous than a normal Thesaurus, in that it tries to "pin down" every unique meaning of a word rather than just listing a bunch of synonyms with different shades of meaning.

It's a fascinating project. It's an attempt to be thorough and methodical about categorizing semantic meaning in English for use in computational linguistics and natural language processing.

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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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  • Easily my favorite book on my book shelf.
    – Karl
    Commented May 26, 2012 at 16:37
  • I've been reading the original edition; it's not only authoritative (for early 20th century), Fowler pulls no punches; if it's wrong he clearly says so, and often colorfully. Much very understated humour too.
    – Steve Smith
    Commented Aug 1, 2018 at 16:15
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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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Wordnik

Wordnik.com is an online dictionary and language resource that provides dictionary and thesaurus content, some of it based on print dictionaries such as the Century Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, WordNet, and GCIDE. Wordnik has collected a corpus of billions of words which it uses to display example sentences, allowing it to provide information on a much larger set of words than a typical dictionary.
[Source: Wikipedia]

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  • I am very happy that I found wordnik; I find it substantially more useful and easier to navigate than OED.
    – David LeBauer
    Commented Dec 2, 2010 at 15:14
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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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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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TheFreeDictionary.com used with the print layout is 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.

Update: The dictionary service provided by Vocabulary.com is blazing fast too. It is easy to configure the service to search for word meanings right from the Chrome address bar

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Just

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  • Looking for the meaning of a phrase or idiom? OneLook will return the results from several on-line dictionaries in just one search. It's been an oft-visited website on my Favorites list for a long time.
    – J.R.
    Commented Mar 19, 2012 at 7:00
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    OneLook also has handy search features. For example you can search for words beginning with ver and containing speech in their definition by entering ver*:speech.
    – donothingsuccessfully
    Commented May 5, 2012 at 17:09
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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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Phrases in English

This site allows searching of two- to eight-word phrases from the British National Corpus.

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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.

The Wordsmithery

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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:

  • Chinese, Simplified
  • Chinese, Traditional
  • Czech
  • Dutch
  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Italian
  • Klingon
  • Korean
  • Latin
  • Russian
  • Spanish
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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 have an old, well-worn, pocket-sized copy of Roget's Thesaurus on my desk at work (I'm a software engineer) that I find invaluable when writing documentation and emails.

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