Skip to Main Content

Non-Fiction: Study of Reference Works

Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books. The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world, from North America to South Africa, from Australia and New Zealand to the Caribbean. It also offers the best in etymological analysis and in listing of variant spellings, and it shows pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Britannica Online

Britannica Online  provides access to Britannica's collection of authoritative references, including their latest article database, articles not found in the hard copy, Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary, the Britannica Book of the Year, as well as thousands of links to other WWW sites selected by Britannica editors.


Biography in Context

Biography in Context delivers outstanding research support with nearly a million biographical entries spanning history and geography.

Samuel Johnson: The Dictionary Man (BBC)

The Development of the Oxford English Dictionary

Britannica 1st edition

Encyclopædia Britannica. Photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica. Web. 6 Nov. 2013. <http://school.eb.com/levels/high/article/32600/media?assemblyId=97337>.

Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

Shinfani, Stacey. No Words Used to Start with X. Digital image. Flickr. 15 Apr. 2008. Web. 23 Sept. 2015. <http://bit.ly/1KuHMNZ>.

 

A Dictionary of the English Language: A Digital Edition of the 1755 Classic by Samuel Johnson. Edited by Brandi Besalke. Last modified: November 25, 2013. http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/.

The Age of the Dictionary (The History of English in Ten Minutes)