What good reference works on English are available?

Question

Questions that can be answered using commonly-available references are off-topic.

What good reference works on English are available, and what kinds of questions are they good at answering?

• General Reference
• Grammar:
  Resources for word and sentence formation (morphology and syntax).
• Dictionaries:
  Resources that describe what individual words mean, how they are pronounced, etc.
• Thesauri:
  Helps find synonyms and antonyms.
• Historical Resources:
  References created in the further past.
• Style:
  Resources that describe different styles (collections of 'rules').
• Translation:
  Tools that convert to and from English.
• Corpora:
  Large collections of source text.

Answer 1

Dictionaries

Useful for finding definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, and examples of usage.

General-purpose dictionaries

The online dictionaries listed here are broadly suitable for native speakers, providing major definitions and examples, pronunciations (including audio), basic etymology, and some usage notes. Some are among the most commonly cited on English Language & Usage.

• Merriam-Webster (MW) — Company which secured the rights to Noah Webster's dictionary, which was highly influential in the development of American English
• American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language – Published by Houghton Mifflin, and developed in part as a reaction to the perceived Webster's Third International Dictionary
• Cambridge Dictionaries Online (CDO) — Portal to several dictionaries produced by Cambridge University Press
• Collins — Published by HarperCollins
• Google (or Bing) Dictionary — Entering define or definition followed by a search-term into the search box will return an entry with its basic definitions, etymology, and an NGram showing the word or phrase's prevalence in the Google Books corpus. Presently these search engines license their definitions from Oxford University Press, making it accurate enough for a quick and convenient check, but "Google" (or "Bing") is not an attributable resource in accordance with our citation policies, because it is not a primary resource and its sources are subject to change. If possible, figure out if you are quoting from the American (New Oxford American Dictionary) or British (Oxford Dictionary of English) version. Otherwise, you can cite "Oxford Languages via Google/Bing".
  • New Oxford American Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of English are also bundled with recent releases of MacOS X and iOS

Learner's dictionaries

A learner's dictionary is geared to the needs of people learning English as a foreign or second language, for example, by providing notes on usage and common errors. Commonly cited on EL&U are the following:

• Oxford Learner's Dictionaries
• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
• Collins COBUILD
• Macmillan English Dictionary
• Cambridge Learner's Dictionary
• Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary

Collaborative dictionaries

• Wiktionary — a publicly edited dictionary. Like any crowdsourced resource it can be easily manipulated, and its definitions and translations should be taken with caution; by the same token, it is likely to include neologisms and new meanings faster than traditional dictionaries will.

Meta-dictionaries

"Meta-dictionary" is something of a misnomer; it is not a dictionary of dictionaries, but a resource that collects entries from multiple resources in a single place.

• OneLook — Provides direct links to definitions posted at many other online reference sites.

• Dictionary.com (Reference.com) — Primarily sourced from the Random House Dictionary for American English and the Collins English Dictionary for British English. Some entries also include additional material from the Online Etymology Dictionary, The Dictionary of American Slang, The American Heritage Idioms Dictionary, and other specialized dictionaries including some medical, legal, and computing sources.

• The Free Dictionary - Primarily sourced from the American Heritage Dictionary, the Collins English Dictionary, and Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary. Most entries include thesaurus entries from WordNet, Roget's, and others, plus translation suggestions from Collins and Kernerman translation dictionaries.

• Wordnik — Primarily sourced from the American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition, The Century Cyclopedia, and WordNet 3.0, but notable for its lengthy lists of related terms and concepts.

• Fine Dictionary— Searches a few popular dictionaries from around the early 20th century, as well as Wordnet 3.6 with quotations, illustrations, and factoids provided alongside the entries.

Historical and dialectical dictionaries

These dictionaries may be helpful for researching word origins and formation, semantic drift, and historical and regional variations.

• The Oxford English Dictionary (online subscription required¹) — The sine qua non of historical dictionaries of English, showing the development of word meanings, including obsolete and obscure meanings.

• The 1st edition of the OED (which began publication as the New English Dictionary) (NED, OED)² is in the public domain: A–B, C, D–E, F–G, H–K, L, M–N, O–P, Q–R, S-Sh, Si–St, Su–Th, Ti–U, V–Z

• Online Etymology Dictionary — An extensive free compilation of word origins compiled by Douglas Harper, drawing on the OED and other sources.

• The English Dialect Dictionary, being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years..., OUP 1898-1905. Compiled by Joseph Wright, the EDD remains a standard in the historical study of dialect.

• A–C, D–G, H–L, M–Q, R–S, T–Z

• Australian National Dictionary — The standard historical dictionary for words and idioms that originate in Australian English.

• Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), subscription required — Based on extensive surveys carried out since the 1960s, the DARE is a compilation of words, phrases, and usages that are specific to a particular region of the United States. Project information is available from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

• Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, 1st edition — Shows meanings of various terms specific to Canada, including obsolete and outdated meanings.

• Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, 2nd edition — Shows meanings of various terms specific to Canada, including obsolete and outdated meanings.

• The Middle English Dictionary — An online searchable version of a 15,000-page dictionary of the same name from The University of Michigan.

• Johnson's Dictionary Online — Covers one of the most known examples of an early dictionary as we know them: A Dictionary of The English Language written by Samuel Johnson and published in 1755.

• Emily Dickinson Lexicon — It is useful for studying the poetess' work and early American English. It provides its own dictionary, and the 1844 printing of The American Dictionary of the English Language, which was the final print Noah Webster edited and published the year after he died at the age of 84.

• American Heritage Dictionary has two appendices that give roots of forbears of English words along with their cognates in the PIE and Proto-Semitic languages respectively

  • Indo-European Roots
  • Semitic Roots

• LexiLogos and more specifically its etymology center is a center for online dictionaries in many languages (the site is in French but that is not needed to use the site).

¹ Many schools and libraries have full access to the OED Online; this is usually also extended to UK residents via their County Library Service or equivalent. The third edition is not available in print, only online, but the first two editions have print forms.

² The original name, when it started fascicle-by-fascicle publication in the 1880s, was A New English Dictionary On Historical Principles, but by the time the last volume was published in 1928 it was generally known as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), under which name subsequent editions (including facsimiles of the original) have gone.

Idioms, expressions, and slang

There are numerous print dictionaries that focus on idioms, including various offerings by Oxford and McGraw-Hill, like the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions.

• TFD Idioms and Phrases — From TheFreeDictionary, a searchable database of idioms from the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms, the Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms.
• The Phrase Finder — Provides meanings and origins of numerous English expressions and sayings, with commentary by Gary Martin.
• Green's Dictionary of Slang — Renowned lexicographer Jonathan Green dedicated a life's work to the study of slang, compiling at least 55,000 headwords, illustrated by more than 640,451 citations. As of 2019, all citations and advanced search features formerly reserved for subscribers are available to the public for free.
• OZDIC - Collocation dictionary. Enter a word to find collocations with that word.

By nature, however, slang usage is informal and ephemeral, and difficult to compile into a definitive reference. Most online slang dictionaries must rely on user input, with wildly varying accuracy and reliability. Nevertheless, they are much faster to update than traditional dictionaries and have dates that help track evolution. Examples include the Online Slang Dictionary, edited by Walter Rader; A Dictionary of Slang by Ted Duckworth; and probably the most popular, Urban Dictionary.

Pronunciation

• Kenyon and Knott's 1949 A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English — The gold standard for American phonemes.
• Howdjsay.com — Created by Tim Bowyer, provides audio clips of a "standard British" pronunciation of various words, with some alternatives, based on the suggested pronunciation given by major dictionaries. It lacks phonetic transcriptions, definitions, or other notations, however.
• Youglish - An online pronunciation 'dictionary' that, when searched for a word, gives a set of Youtube videos where the word is spoken (as found in captions), plus the IPA.
• Forvo — An online pronunciation dictionary with audio pronunciations submitted and voted on by members. Its goal is "All the words in the world. Pronounced." It has excellent basic coverage of English, with more common words often represented in multiple dialects.
• PronunDict is a free pronunciation dictionary of American English. Its key features are searching by pronunciation and simple wildcard matching. The data source is the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (CMUdict) or its derivative AmEPD. The disadvantages are that there are some errors in the dictionary entries, and that marking of boundaries of stressed syllables does not always work perfectly.

Legal Dictionaries

• The Law Dictionary featuring Black's Law Dictionary Free Online Legal Dictionary 2nd Ed. — The most popular legal dictionary in the U.S.
• The Free Dictionary — Once again it includes a large number of other legal dictionaries. Citations vary on a term-by-term basis.

Answer 2

Thesauri

Useful for finding synonyms of specific words.

• Merriam-Webster
• Thesaurus.com
• Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (included with Mac OS X)
• Power Thesaurus
• WordNet

Answer 3

Corpora

Large collections of original source text. The online tools that are available for searching corpora, however, may be overkill for the average user, and may be confusing to use.

• English-Corpora.org - Formerly corpus.byu.edu, this is perhaps the most popular corpus search engine, created by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University. Key collections include the following:

• British National Corpus - the BNC was a project of Oxford University Press covering a diverse range of spoken and written British English from about 1980 to 1993.

• British Newspaper Archive: The British Newspaper Archive is a partnership between the British Library and findmypast to digitize up to 40 million newspaper pages from the British Library's vast collection over the next 10 years.

• Chronicling America: Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

• Corpus of Contemporary American English - the largest freely-available corpus of American English, COCA includes spoken and written American English from a variety of sources from 1990–2017.

• Corpus of Historical American English - The largest structured corpus of historical English, COHA contains text from American publications from the 1810s to the 2000s.

• Elephind: Search the world's historical newspaper archives.

• Hansard Corpus - contains nearly every speech given in the British Parliament from 1803 to 2005.

• News on the Web (NOW) Corpus - contains billions of words from web-based newspapers and magazines since 2010. Helpful for searches on very recent usage, as millions of words are added daily.

• TV Corpus - contains words from 75,000 television episodes from the 1950s to the current time, linked to their IMDb entries, and an excellent source for informal spoken language

• Corpus of Online Registers of English - Based on research by Douglas Biber, Mark Davies, and Jesse Egbert, CORE uses more finely tuned categories for sources such as recipe, sermon, travel blog, or interview, allowing for greater context and insights into usage

• Corpus Concordance English at LexTutor - Conceived by Chris Greaves and built by Tom Cobb at the Université du Québec à Montréal, this website provides a searchable interface to more than three dozen corpora including the BNC, Brown Corpus of American English, the JPU Corpus, and US television dialog compiled by Marlise Horst at Concordia University.

• Google Books - A service of Google through which over 25 million books have been scanned; while the visibility of copyrighted works is restricted, the size and relative comprehensiveness of the Google Books corpus makes it useful for finding usage examples and historical prevalence. The resource is flawed in that it makes no account of spoken English, and contains numerous OCR and metadata errors leading to skewed results.

• Google Books Ngram Viewer - A simple interface for comparing the prevalence of words or phrases in the Google Books corpora and charting them as n-grams, as well as comparing results from sub-corpora (for example, comparing the prevalence of a word or phrase in British vs. American English). See the info page for syntax and FAQs.
  
  Ngrams can be embedded in EL&U posts by selecting Embed Chart, copying the src value from the <iframe> tag, changing interactive_chart to chart, and supplying the resulting URL as the image source.

• Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English - A searchable corpus of transcripts of academic speeches recorded at the University of Michigan.

• Fraze.It A service with a more user-friendly interface by the creator of YouGlish, which provides over 100 million phrases demonstrating how words are used in context.

Answer 4

Style

The guidelines governing the presentation of written English are collectively referred to as style and are laid out in various rulebooks and manuals. The purpose of these guidelines is to provide a uniform presentation, to improve readability, and as a mark of professionalism. Some industries, such as screenwriting, use specific formats, but any individual organization or even an individual publication can enforce a house style. If a writer has not been directed to follow a particular style or other guidelines, s/he is encouraged to choose a suitable style and be consistent in its use.

For example, there is consensus that major words in the title of a book should be capitalized, but difference on what constitutes a major word. There is consensus that the publication year of a reference should be included in its citation, but difference on whether it should be indicated with a comma, parentheses, or other punctuation. Hellenic, Greek, and Græcian are all valid words that can be found in a dictionary, but a publication may have specific rules for when each may be used. If a question asks about an area where there is broad consensus, it is likely to be closed due to insufficient research.

General Style Guides

Of the most popular general style guides, only Oxford and Chicago are available online, and only with a subscription.

• Fowler’s Modern English Usage (formally known as A Dictionary of Modern English Usage) is the most widely cited guide for British English usage, pronunciation, and writing, but it is not available online.

• The Oxford Style Guide and New Hart's Rules (not to be confused with the University of Oxford Style Guide or Oxford University Press House Style) is a popular reference for British writers and editors. A subscription is required for the online edition.

• The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) is the most popular style guide used for non-journalistic writing in the United States. It is also accepted by most universities. Many finer points are covered in its free Questions and Answers blog, and Purdue OWL has a section for the Chicago/Turabian citation style; "Turabian Style" refers to Kate L. Turabian's Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, based on Chicago Style but focused on academic publishing.

• Hyphenation Table: CMOS publishes a free, downloadable 10-page Hyphenation Table, which covers hyphenation usage for almost every imaginable word string at this link.

• Practical English Usage by Michael Swan is a popular grammar and usage reference aimed at non-native speakers of English. It is also available online.

• The Gregg Reference Manual (GRM), created for American stenographers and typists, is available online with a subscription.

Academic and Scientific Style Guides

• ACS Style, from the American Chemical Society, is widely used in physical sciences, notably by chemistry and physics journals.
• The AMA Manual of Style requires a subscription; it is widely used in medicine and healthcare research.
• APA Style, developed by the American Psychological Association, is widely used in the social sciences. A subscription is required for the style guide, but the citation style is accessible at the Purdue OWL.
• Bishop Fox Cybersecurity Style Guide, from malicious viruses to viral memes, for security researchers.
• IEEE Style, from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is based largely on Chicago Style, but with a focus on engineering, particularly computer science.
• MHRA Style is governed by the Modern Humanities Research Association, and is commonly preferred for theses in UK universities.
• MLA (Modern Language Association) Style is widely used in arts and humanities academia. Official MLA Style publications (the Handbook and the Style Manual) are not available online; however, an MLA Formatting and Style Guide is provided by the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University.
• Scientific Style and Format, the manual for CSE Style, requires a subscription. It is widely used in scientific publishing, especially in life sciences.

Journalist Style Guides

• AP Style, subscription-required, is the standard style guide followed by major newspapers in the United States. Special derivatives and elucidations on AP style are printed by the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times but are not available online to the public. A derivative called The Tameri Guide for Writers is freely available.
• BBC News Style Guide
• Canadian Press Stylebook, requires a subscription.
• Reuters Handbook of Journalism covers the Reuters house style for general reporting and for sports reporting.
• The Economist Style Guide is a highly popular style guide, particularly for international audiences
• The Guardian and Observer Style Guide
• The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, 5th Edition
• The Telegraph Style Book
• National Geographic Style Manual
• The Diversity Style Guide, a project of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University, is "not a guide to being politically correct. Rather, it offers guidance, context, and nuance for media professionals struggling to write about people who are different from themselves and communities different from their own" in its own words. It also links to identity-related style guides from other organizations.
• The Religion Stylebook is an independent supplement to the AP Handbook, published by the Religion Newswriters Association, aimed at journalists who report on religion in the mainstream media
• The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual offers International Game Journalists Association standards for videogame terminology as used in game journalism
• BuzzFeed's Style Guide, reflecting its content, may offer guidance on the presentation of popular culture or new technology not covered by other guides.

Governmental Style Guides

Note: No government of any major English-speaking country attempts to enforce English style or usage as a matter of law or regulation. These guides are published mainly for writers in the employ of the respective governmental office or body.

• Australia: Commonwealth Government Printing Office Style Manual
• Canada: Canadian Style from the Bureau of Translation
• European Commission: English Style Guide
• The Philippines: Executive Branch Style Manual
• South Africa: GCIS Editorial Style Guide
• United Nations Editorial Manual
• United States: Government Printing Office Style Manual
  Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications
• World Bank Editorial Style Guide
• World Trade Organization Editorial Manual

Other

• Wikipedia Manual of Style (MoS) governs usage on Wikipedia.
• Nitpicker is "an overly picky language style checker"

Older style guides tend to be strongly prescriptive, that is, flatly asserting that certain usages are wrong even if they are widely used and well-understood. Some recommendations or cautions have been transformed and transmitted over the years as "rules" that are rejected by professional writers and linguists alike, such as the prejudice against the passive voice or against ending sentences with prepositions. Therefore, writers must be cautious about the stylistic advice given in popular guides like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, or older editions of Fowler's.

Answer 5

General Language and English Language Reference

• The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. 2003.
• The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd ed. 2010.

Both are written and edited by David Crystal. They should be in every Anglophone classroom in the world, and should be consulted first about questions bearing on English.

All works by David Crystal are trustworthy, but these encyclopedias are really well-organized, and full of useful information.

Answer 6

Grammar

• McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English. It turns out that the first three chapters of this classic 1998 grammar are available free on Google Books. The rest of the book is not.

This seems to be very good marketing for the University of Chicago Press, or whoever made this decision, because it gives a good and useful sample of what's in the book. The first three chapters are the general ones, where the author lays out the methodology, definitions, examples, and tests for syntax. They're all most people need to read; the other chapters are specialized on individual construction types and other issues.

These chapters consist of

1. (pp 1-10) Introduction
2. (pp 11-54) Overview of the Scheme of Syntactic Analysis Adopted Below
3. (pp 55-81) Some Tests for Deep and Surface Constituent Structure

There are useful tree diagrams and excellent example sentences throughout. Anyone familiar with what's in these three chapters has gone a long way toward mastering English syntax.

McCawley's book is very clear, but it is a technical scientific work intended as a college textbook for a year-long course. It's not necessary to understand linguistics to benefit from the book; however, readers will have to understand that spoken English is what grammar, and therefore this book, is about. There is no treatment of spelling, punctuation, or "correct" grammar, for instance; these are not syntactic phenomena, but social ones.

• Pullum and Huddleston's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. This gigantic (1860 pages) and magisterial reference book was published in 2002.

Huddleston and Pullum covers everything -- including, for example, a chapter on punctuation by Geoffrey Nunberg -- and introduces a number of terminological innovations that may become widely accepted in a while; my advice is to be wary of the terminology -- learn it, and learn the alternative terms as well. They are discussed as they are introduced.

For example, what McCawley calls a "restrictive relative clause", Pullum and Huddleston call an "essential relative clause"; what McC calls a "particle" up in phrasal verbs like pick up, P&H call an "intransitive preposition" up. You will find both sets of terms (among many others, from all over the world) used here on EL&U.

Answer 7

Translation

Dictionaries and Lexica

• Linguee - a search engine rather than an automatic translator, Linguee allows the user to find words and phrases in context in human-translated works, in addition to an editorial dictionary.
• bab.la - a language project by Andreas Schroeter and Patrick Uecker and sponsored by Langenscheidt providing 39 bilingual dictionaries for 28 languages.
• IATE - provides official translations of terminology as used by EU institutions, maintained by the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union.
• Termium Plus - provides official translations of the Canadian government into Canadian English and Canadian French

Machine Translations

Machine translations are generated by computer software which compares parallel texts produced by human translators and attempts to identify patterns and apply them to submitted text. The result can be helpful for short, simple text, but is often inaccurate, unidiomatic, or flat-out incorrect, and so should be used with caution.

• Google Translate - a statistical machine translation service based on documents in 80 languages in Google's indices
• Babelfish - supports 75 languages
• Bing Translator - web access to Microsoft Translator, which handles about 45 languages

Answer 8

Historical Resources

These are books of possible interest to people who are investigating word and phrase origins and want to know what meanings those words or phrases were said to have at various times in the past. Several of them do not show up in a direct Google Books search by title. I've run into the hidden ones by chance while searching for a particular word or phrase that they happen to contain.

Dictionaries before or overlapping Samuel Johnson's

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Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabetical (1604)

John Bulloker, An English Expositor: Teaching the Interpretation of the Hardest Words Used in Our Language

• (1616)

• (1641)

• revised and corrected by W. S. (1656)

• fourth edition (1667)

• fifth edition (1676)

• sixth edition (1680)

Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionary: or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words

• second edition (1626)

• fifth edition (1637)

• seventh edition (1642)

• ninth edition (1650)

• tenth edition (1651)

• eleventh edition (1658)

Thomas Blount, Glossographia: Or a Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words

• (1656)

• third edition (1670)

• fourth edition (1674)

Thomas Blount, Glossographia Anglicana Nova: Or, A Dictionary, Interpreting Such Hard Words of Whatever Language, as Are Present Used in the English Tongue, with Their Etymologies, Definitions, &c. (1707)

Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words, or a General Dictionary

• (1658)

• (1662)

Edward Phillips & John Kersey, The New World of Words: or, Universal English Dictionary

• sixth edition (1706)

• seventh edition (1720)

Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary, Explaining the Difficult Terms That Are Used in Divinity, Husbandry, Physick, Philosophy, Law, Navigation, Mathematicks, and Other Arts and Sciences

• (1676)

• (1692)

• (1717)

Stephen Blancard, The Physical Dictionary: Wherein the Terms of Anatomy, the Names and Causes of Diseases, Chirurgical Instruments, and Their Use, Are Accurately Describ'd

• second edition (1693)

• fourth edition (1702)

• seventh edition (1726)

John Kersey, Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum: Or, A General English Dictionary

• (1708)

• second edition (1715)

• third edition (1721)

John Kersey, A New English Dictionary: or, A Compleat Collection of the Most Proper and Significant Words, and Terms of Art Commonly Used in the Language

• fourth edition (1739)

• seventh edition (1757)

Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary

• second edition (1724)

• fifth edition (1731)

• fourteenth edition (1751)

• seventeenth edition (1757)

• twenty-first edition (1770)

• twenty-third edition (1773)

Bailey, Dictionarium Britannicum: Or a More Compleat Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1730)

Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, Containing an Additional Collection of Words (Not in the First Volume)…Vol. II

• third edition (1737)

Nathan Bailey, [The New Universal Etymological English Dictionary

• fifth edition (1760)

• seventh edition (1776)

Thomas Dyche & William Pardon, A New General English Dictionary

• (1735)

• third edition (1740)

• fourth edition (1744)

• eighth edition (1754)

• ninth edition (1758)

• eleventh edition (1760)

• fourteenth edition (1771)

• sixteenth edition (1777)

• eighteenth edition (1781)

E. Chambers, Cyclopædia; Or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences [predecessor to Encyclopedia Britannica]

• fifth edition, volume 1 (A–K) (1741)

• [fifth edition, volume 2 (L–Z) (1743) [https://books.google.com/books?id=ciiIaFU06vMC&printsec=frontcover&f=false)

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language

• volume 1 (A–K) (1755) (with full citations)

• volume 2 (L–K) (1755) (with full citations)

• volume 1 (A–Z) (1756)

• volume 2 (L–Z) (1756)

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Slang dictionaries and glossaries before or overlapping 1900

Richard Head, "Canting Vocabulary," in The English Rogue, Described, in the life of Meriton Latroon (pages 47–53) (1665)

G.L., "A Canting Academy or Pedlars-French Dictionary," in The Amorous Gallant's Tongue Tipped with Golden Expressions (pages 111–118) (1674/1741)

B.E., New Dictionary of the Canting Crew (1699)

Charles Hitching, "The names of the Flash Words now in Vogue amongst Thieves," in The Regulator (pages 19–20) (1718)

Dr. Saman, "The Compleat Canting Dictionary," in Aristotle’s Legacy, or His Golden Cabinet of Secrets Opened (pages 145–156) (1720)

A New Canting Dictionary (1725)

Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

• (1785)

• second edition (1788)

• revised and corrected by Pierce Egan (1823)

Francis Grose & George Cruikshank, Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (1811)

Francis Grose, A Provincial Glossary: With a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions

• (1787)

• second edition (1790)

• revised by Samuel Pegge (1839)

Gradus Ad Cantabrigiam: Or, A Dictionary of Terms: Academical and Colloquial, or Cant, Which Are Used at the University of Cambridge

• (1803)

• 1824)

George Andrewes, A Dictionary of the Slang and Cant Languages (1809)

The Flash Dictionary (1821)

Jon Bee [John Badcock], [Sporting Slang]

• Slang [of the Sporting World] (1823)

• Sportsman’s Slang; a New Dictionary of Terms Used in the Affairs of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, and the Cock-Pit (1825)

Bemjamin Hall, A Collection of College Words and Customs

• (1851)

• second edition (1856)

George Matsell, Vocabulum or Rogue’s Dictionary (1859)

John Hotten, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words aka The Slang Dictionary

• (1859)

• second edition (1860)

• (1864)

• (1865)

• (1869)

• (1870)

• (1872)

• (1894)

Richard Fox, Slang Dictionary of New York, London and Paris (ca. 1880)

Albert Barrère & Charles Leland, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant

• Volume 1 (A–K) (1889)

• Volume 2 (L–Z) (1890)

• Volume 1 (A–K) (1897)

• Volume 2 (L–Z) (1897)

John S. Farmer & W. E. Henley, Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present

• Volume 1 (A–Byz) (1890)

• Volume 2 (C–Fizzle) (1891)

• Volume 3 (Fla–Hyps) (1893)

• Volume 4 (I–Myz) (1896)

• Volume 5 (N–Raz) (1902)

• Volume 6 (Rea–Stozzle) (1903)

• Volume 7 (Stra–Z) (1904)

James Maitland, The American Slang Dictionary (1891)

Answer 9

Dictionary.com gives all the source references on one page, from English and slang to science, computing, and medical dictionaries, including History and Origin, all from specific dictionaries. It includes nearby words, related searches, and all words from the root.

RhymeZone.com gives rhymes, thesaurus, similar-sounding words, quotations, homophones, letter-matching searches, pictures, and even Shakespeare references. It has links to the Bible books, famous quotes, and several links to specific genres produced by Shakespeare.

The Purdue OWL is an Online Writing Lab for tutoring or learning to write well in English. I recommend taking a look, also, at the OWL site map to see the range of subjects covered.

I recommend the site EngVid for clearing up questions about grammar rules, and other English language dilemmas. There are videos for over 500 subjects on that site, all related to English. Some people learn better through watching demonstrations on a whiteboard. These videos work well for tutoring, too.

I also believe you need a link to the Middle English Dictionary. It may be an obscure language, but we still study the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, and John Gower's Confessio Amantis.

Answer 10

Dissection or Parse of Sentences

Courtesy of https://english.stackexchange.com/a/233771/50720, I encountered the Link Parser.

Answer 11

Lexipedia:

For the word you search, it has:

• Nouns
• Adverbs
• Verbs
• Adjectives
• Synonyms
• Antonyms
• Fuzzynyms

Answer 12

YourDictionary.com

also has example sentences using specific words

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