Encycl. & Dictionaries

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Word Sense : matching thoughts to words
http://wordsense.me/
Word Sense : matching thoughts to words
Word Sense is a dictionary, thesaurus, and valuable tool for matching thoughts to words like never before.

Shamblesguru's Live Twitter Stream
https://twitter.com/shamblesguru
Tweets by @shamblesguru

Kids Open Dictionary Builder
http://dictionary.k12opened.com/
Kids Open Dictionary Builder
The purpose of this project is to create a free, open simple dictionary for students to use. This dictionary will ultimately be published in a variety of formats and for multiple platforms.
To add to this project, find a word you'd like to write a definition for or click "Instant Karma" for a random word. Please consult the style guidelines for editorial information.
Don't be shy! Whatever you do doesn't have to be perfect; we'll all build on it and make it better. Just jump in and add something.
If you'd like to become an editor on this project or you'd like to attend or host a workshop on Open Ed, contact us. Thank you!

The Kids Open Dictionary from Karen Fasimpaur on Vimeo.

Encyclopedia Britannica vs. Wikipedia [INFOGRAPHIC]
http://mashable.com/2012/03/16/encyclopedia-britannica-wikipedia-infographic/
Encyclopedia Britannica vs. Wikipedia [INFOGRAPHIC]

Graphwords (for the visual learners)
http://graphwords.com/word#word
Graphwords
An online interactive English dictionary and thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and show connections among associated words.
You can easily see the meaning of each by simply placing the mouse cursor over it.
To search for a word, type the word in the search box at the top of the window and press the "Draw" button. You may also press the enter key instead. After searching for a word, the main display will populate with many words and meanings. The word you searched for will appear in the center of the display, and will be surrounded with words and meanings that are related to it. To save what is currently displayed in the Graph Words, you can press the "Save as image" button on the toolbar.

WordStash
http://www.wordstash.com/
WordStash is a dictionary .. part dictionary, part flash card. It provides users with a beautiful layout and a number of tools to help you learn the words you look up.

Kinderpedia
http://www.kinderpedia.com
Kinderpedia
Elementary science and kids first dictionary with pictures and videos. Topics are organised alphabetical order and lesson plan for each topic.

Shahi is a visual dictionary
http://blachan.com/shahi
Shahi is a visual dictionary
... combines Wiktionary content with Flickr images, and more

Rule Britannica?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8150129.stm
Rule Britannica?
Encyclopaedia Britannica has been ranked the 10th strongest consumer brand in the UK. With the internet dominated by free reference sites, what's its appeal?
In a world where Wikipedia is THE first port of call for many millions of internet users, a paid-for encyclopaedia, such as Britannica, risks looking like an ageing and ailing relative.
But a (2009) poll of Britain's top consumer brands has placed Encyclopaedia Britannica in 10th place.

Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual
Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
The first printing of the first edition of the book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual is now (January 25, 2009) also a set of wiki pages in the Help: namespace of Wikipedia. The content has been released by the publisher, O'Reilly Media/Pogue Press, and by the author, John Broughton, under the standard Wikipedia free content license.

Visuwords : online graphical dictionary
http://www.visuwords.com
Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.
Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

Visual Dictionary Online
http://visual.merriam-webster.com/
Visual Dictionary Online
The Visual Dictionary Online is an interactive dictionary with an innovative approach.
From the image to the word and its definition, the Visual Dictionary Online is an all-in-one reference. Search the themes to quickly locate words, or find the meaning of a word by viewing the image it represents. What’s more, the Visual Dictionary Online helps you learn English in a visual and accessible way. The Visual Dictionary Online is ideal for teachers, parents, translators and students of all skill levels. Explore the Visual Dictionary Online and enrich your mind. Perfect for home, school or work. Discover a visual world of information!

Lingro
http://lingro.com/
Lingro - turns any webpage into an interactive language learning tool
Lingro takes any webpage and then allows you to click on any word in that page to get its translation back into English, Spanish, French, Polish, German or Italian.

Erin McKean: Redefining the dictionary (online video)
http://www.ted.com/talks/erin_mckean_redefines_the_dictionary.html
Erin McKean: Redefining the dictionary
Dictionary editor Erin McKean has an infectious passion for words. At the helm of the Oxford American Dictionary, she's helping to reshape not just the traditional reference library, but our very language.
Paper dictionaries, she says, have kept our stock of words trimmed down to the size of, well, a dictionary. But with electronic, interconnected reference works, our supply of words has become limitless -- a prospect that clearly thrills McKean.

Visuwords ... visual dictionary
http://www.visuwords.com/
Visuwords online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.
Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

Ninjawords
http://ninjawords.com/
Ninjawords : A really fast dictionary... fast like a ninja.
web 2.0

English-language Wiktionary,
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Main_Page
Welcome to the English-language Wiktionary, a collaborative project to produce a free, multilingual dictionary with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations.
Wiktionary is the lexical companion to the open-content encyclopedia Wikipedia.
In this English edition, started on December 12, 2002, we currently have 311,736 entries in 389 languages. Learn how to start a page, how to edit entries, experiment in the sandbox and visit our Community Portal to see how you can participate in the development of Wiktionary. The content of Wiktionary is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License; see Wiktionary copyrights for details.

The FreeDictionary
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/
TheFreeDictionary
TheFreeDictionary.com now allows you to create your own personal homepage by adding and removing, dragging and dropping, and "using or losing" existing content windows.
In addition, you can add your own bookmarks, weather information, stock market tracker, and RSS feeds from anywhere on the web.
web 2.0

English Chinese Dictionary
http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/dictionary.html
English Chinese Dictionary
70 000 entries, user friendly (one search box for chinese, pinyin or English), proverbs and place names.

Urban Dictionary
http://www.urbandictionary.com/
Urban Dictionary is a slang dictionary with your definitions.
Define your world.

InfoVisual : Visual dictionary
http://www.infovisual.info/index.html
InfoVisual : Visual dictionary
To learn by way of image with thematic, clear and precise pages, with concise and rigorous texts, bilingual, the InfoVisual will become a very good academic resource. The InfoVisual is different from an encyclopedia or from a traditional online dictionary because the images replace the words. A teaching website of reference which will be able to find an essential place as a good link on your site.
Human Body | Music | Transport | Animal biology | Vegetable biology |

Encyclopedia of fruits
http://www.thefruitbook.com
Encycopedia of fruits

The Internet Picture Dictionary
http://www.pdictionary.com/
The Internet Picture Dictionary
The Internet Picture Dictionary is a completely free, online multilingual picture dictionary designed especially for ESL students and beginning English, French, German, Spanish and Italian language learners of all ages.

Answers (was Gurunet)
https://www.answers.com/
Answers.com is a free, ad-supported, reference search service, created to provide you with instant answers on over a million topics. As opposed to standard search engines that serve up a list of links for you to follow, Answers.com displays quick, snapshot answers with concise, reliable information.
Our editors take our content from over 100 authoritative encyclopedias, dictionaries, glossaries and atlases, carefully chosen for breadth and quality.
For ultimate convenience, install 1-Click AnswersTM software, and click on any word in any document on your screen for "Answers at your Fingertips".

OneLook : Dictionary Search
http://www.onelook.com/
OneLook : Dictionary Search
Think of this web site as a search engine for words and phrases: If you have a word for which you'd like a definition or translation, we'll quickly shuttle you to the web-based dictionaries that define or translate that word. If you don't know how to spell the word, we'll help you do that too. No word is too obscure: More than 5 million words in more than 900 online dictionaries are indexed by the OneLook search engine.
Internet Explorer users on Windows, click here to install a "right click" menu option that lets you define any word on any web page.

OneLook Dictionary Search
http://www.onelook.com
OneLook Dictionary Search
Think of this web site as a search engine for words and phrases: If you have a word for which you'd like a definition or translation, we'll quickly shuttle you to the web-based dictionaries that define or translate that word. If you don't know how to spell the word, we'll help you do that too. No word is too obscure: More than 5 million words in more than 900 online dictionaries are indexed by the OneLook search engine.

Google to find dictionary definitions
https://www.google.com/help/features.html#dictionary
To use Google to find dictionary definitions, enter your query into the search box as you would normally. Any or all parts of your query for which we have a dictionary definition will be underlined in the center text above our search results.
Clicking on the link will take you to the relevant definition from a dictionary provider, which has been selected solely on the basis of its quality.

WordWeb Pro
https://wordweb.info/
WordWeb Pro - Thesaurus/dictionary, word and anagram finder
WordWeb Pro is a quick and powerful English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows. It can be used to lookup words from almost any Windows program, showing definitions, synonyms and related words. You can search for words matching a pattern, find and solve anagrams, and optionally search a large number of extra word lists.
Unlike any paper dictionary or thesaurus WordWeb is truly a Word Web - each set of synonyms is linked to other related sets. Lookup "tree", click on the "Types" tab and you'll have a list of different types of tree. Click on "Part of" and WordWeb will tell you that a tree can be part of a "forest" or "wood".
There is an evaluation copy available to download ... and also a free 'cut-down' version.

Acronym Finder
http://www.acronymfinder.com
Acronym Finder
The web's most comprehensive database of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms. 253,000+ definitions!
acronym | acronyms |

American Dialect Society
http://www.americandialect.org/
Founded more than a century ago, the American Dialect Society is dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it.

Encyclopedia.com
http://www.encyclopedia.com/
Encyclopedia.com was created by Infonautics Corporation to provide Internet users with a simple, one-stop research site. Composed of high-quality articles from the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, the site links more than 50,000 diverse articles to the resources available on Infonautics' popular online research service.

Wordsmyth
http://www.wordsmyth.net/
Wordsmyth is an innovative and evolving language reference source that meshes the functions of a dictionary and a thesaurus with powerful and flexible search capabilities. Both the Wordsmyth Educational Dictionary-Thesaurus and the Wordsmyth web site reflect the philosophy that word meanings are not simply equations that one can get right or get wrong, but rather grow out of and depend on specific uses and contexts.

WordWeb Pro
http://www.wordweb.co.uk
WordWeb Pro is a quick and powerful English thesaurus and dictionary. Unlike any paper dictionary or thesaurus WordWeb is truly a Word Web - each set of synonyms is linked to other related sets. Lookup "tree", click on the "Types" tab and you'll have a list of different types of tree. Click on "Part of" and WordWeb will tell you that a tree can be part of a "forest" or "wood".
WordWeb Pro also has a powerful engine for finding words matching a pattern - great for crosswords or finding that word you can't quite remember. The anagram feature will generate fun multi-word anagrams for you, and you can also find partial anagrams.

Acronym Finder
http://www.acronymfinder.com/
The Acronym Finder is a world wide web (WWW) searchable database of more than 188,000 abbreviations and acronyms about computers, technology, telecommunications, and military acronyms and abbreviations.

Foldoc
http://foldoc.org/
Free Online Dictionary of Computing and IT
Includes over 7900 entries defining computer terms.

IT Encyclopedia
http://www.informationweek.com/default.asp
More than 20,000 IT /ICT terms explained.

Bartleby.com
http://www.bartleby.com/reference/
Bartleby.com combines the best of both contemporary and classic reference works into the most comprehensive public reference library ever published on the web.

NatureServe
http://www.natureserve.org/
An Online Encyclopedia of Life
Welcome to NatureServe, a source for authoritative conservation information on more than 50,000 plants, animals, and ecological communities of the United States and Canada. NatureServe provides in-depth information on rare and endangered species, but includes common plants and animals too.

Hebrew Dictionary
http://www.dictionary.co.il/
Very comprehensive searchable database.

Assorted Encyclopedias on the Web
http://edis.win.tue.nl/encyclop.html
Over 30 different encyclopedias

FunkandWagnalls
http://www.funkandwagnalls.com/
Multimedia Encyclopedias / Dictionaries.... a number to choose from

Encyclopedia Mythica
http://www.pantheon.org/
This is an encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, legends, and more. It contains over 5700 definitions of gods and goddesses, supernatural beings and legendary creatures and monsters from all over the world.

Welcome to Britannica.com
http://www.britannica.com/
The Encyclopaedia Britannica made the entire contents of its 32 volumes available for free on the internet in October 1999. Web users around the world will be able to browse through 44 million words, kept up to date by 7,000 researchers around the world. Since the first edition in 1768, the encyclopaedia has expanded to 33,000 pages and costs £800. The site will also carry news services, magazine articles and collect information and links to other parts of the internet.