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Corpora, dictionaries, and other reference tools

The Internet Grammar of English

BYU corpora

Simple registration needed, but freely available. The BNC (100 m words), COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English, 410 m words), COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 400 m words), and the TIME Magazine corpus (100 m words), all using the same kind of interface. The interface is pretty straightforward and there is plenty of help available. Some limitations as regards manipulating concordances, but good frequency lists and distribution charts, collocation information, and especially comparison of words or expressions.

BNCWeb (alternative link: BNCWeb)

Requires you to login using your university basic user account and password.
The 100m word British National Corpus installed on a university server with an easy-to-use interface that allows many kinds of searches. All the advantages of the old version (fast searches, ease of switching between sentence and KWIC format when viewing the results, postquery options including collocation and distribution patterns, etc.); but now more complex searches are possible - no longer restricted to lexical searches.

BNC Simple Search

Limited search facility available form the BNC homepage. Gives you a maximum 50 examples in complete sentence form drawn at random from a corpus of 100 million words. The selection is truly random -- you do not get the same 50 every time). (If for some reason the natcorp server is down, try http://thetis.bl.uk/lookup.html.)

TamBiC - The Tampere Bilingual Corpus of Finnish and English

Compiled by Robert Cooper. Now available to anyone with a university user account. (Note the Help button for tips on how to search and the About TamBic button for information about the corpus.)

Oxford English Dictionary

Full online service, accessed via this link on university computers (click Enter OED online). From elsewhere, accessible via the library's Nelli portal (Go to the library pages, click Nelli, select Dictionaries under Electronic books). Login with your basic user account and password when prompted.

OALD

The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (Eighth edition). Excellent. Has both BrE and AmE pronunciations, both in transcription and sound samples.

OAAD

The Oxford Advanced American Dictionary. New (2011). Geared to AmE learners (e.g. AmE pronunciations only), otherwise like the OALD.

Cambridge Dictionaries online

This site hosts the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary (select Learner's from the drop-down menu).

LDOCE

The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English online.

Macmillan Dictionary

COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary

Here is one interface to this pioneering and distinctive learner's dictionary.

University of Vaasa

Provides links for dictionaries and glossaries in many different languages and fields.

Merriam-Webster Online

Onelook.com dictionary List

A comprehensive list of various online dictionaries sorted according to subject. Subjects covered: Arts and Humanities, Business, Computer/Internet, Medical, Miscellaneous, Religion, Science, Sports, Technological, General, Slang and more.

Dictionary.reference.com