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Dictionaries General | American and English | French (primarily) | Italian General: Many languagesThis collection covers “25 different subject areas, bringing together 2 million digitized entries across Oxford University Press’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias.” You can search the entire collection or a set of works (e.g., reference tools in literature, classics, performing arts) or a specific title (e.g., The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy). Note that many of these resources are electronic versions of “concise” editions of much larger printed works, some of which, like the OED, also exist in electronic form. R. P. Blackmur called the Oxford English Dictionary “that palace of saltatory heuristics.” This online version is updated quarterly. You might also enjoy taking a look at the imposing printed volumes of the first edition, which was edited by James A. H. Murray and published as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; founded mainly on the materials collected by The Philological Society. They are to be found under the call number (SE) PE1625.M7q in the English Graduate Study Room, C-1-L Firestone Library. (For access to the room, inquire at the Firestone Circulation Desk.) The OED Online includes the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was conceived and compiled by the Department of English Language of the University of Glasgow. According to a promotional brochure sent out in January 2011, “[T]he Historical Thesaurus allows readers to discover synonyms for individual words in the OED (and then trace their development over time), and to chart the linguistic progress of a chosen object or concept, with links to the OED definition of each new word.” Dictionary of Old English, A–I Dictionary of Old English Project, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. Dictionary of Old English Corpus Offers the complete corpus of Old English in machine-readable form. From the “About” page: “The Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus is an online database consisting of at least one copy of every surviving Old English text. In some cases, more than one copy is included, if it is significant because of dialect or date. As such, the DOE Web Corpus represents over three million words of Old English and fewer than a million words of Latin, or almost five times the collected works of Shakespeare.”Part of the Middle English Compendium. According to the home page, “This electronic version of the MED preserves all the details of the print MED, but goes far beyond this, by converting its contents into an enormous database, searchable in ways impossible within any print dictionary.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged According to the “About” page (accessed 8 March 2018), “Merriam-Webster Unabridged is the largest, most comprehensive American dictionary currently available in print or online. It is built on solid footings of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged and is the best source of current information about the English language. “We are actively engaged in creating an entirely new edition of the Unabridged, and new and revised entries and usage content will be added to the site on a continuing basis.” Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable Indispensable. The Brewer of the title is the Rev. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, 1810–1897, who published the first edition of his dictionary in 1870. The title page accurately describes the book as “Giving the Derivation, Source or Origin of Common Phrases, Allusions, and Words that have a Tale to Tell.” . The 1989 edition is in the Trustee Reading Room at (DR) PN43.B65 1989 and in the Scribner Library at (SE) PN43.B65 1989. The 18th edition is in the Firestone stacks at PN43.B65 2009. The 19th edition is in the Trustee Reading Room at (DR) PN43.B65 2012; in the Scribner Library Reference Collection at (SREF) PN43.B65 2012; and in the Firestone stacks at PN43.B65 2012. See the Library Catalog record for an electronic version of the 19th edition, edited by Susie Bent. As Bent points out in her introduction, Brewer’s “is not a straightforward dictionary, nor is it an encyclopaedia. It is, in fact, unlike any other reference book that exists, anywhere.” WordNet® This resource is definitely worth consulting when you’re working with words—whether your own or someone else’s. According to the home page, “WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets. WordNet was developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University under the direction of Professor George A. Miller (Principal Investigator).” French, English, and bilingual dictionaries from ARTFL ARTFL provides access to the third edition of Robert Estienne’s Dictionarium latinogallicum (1552), the first Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise (1694), Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, and many other useful resources, including Le Trésor de la langue française informatisé. Grand Corpus des dictionnaires More palaces of saltatory heuristics, including: Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle Robert Estienne, Dictionaire Francoiſlatin, 1549 Jean Nicot, Thrésor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne, 1606 Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, 1611 Gilles Ménage, Les Origines de la langue françoise, 1650 Pierre Richelet, Dictionnaire françois, 1680 Antoine Furetière, Essai d’un dictionaire universel, 1687 Antoine Furetière, Dictionaire universel, 1690 Gilles Ménage, Dictionnaire étymologique ou Origines de la langue françoise, 1694 Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise dedié au Roy, 1694 Thomas Corneille, Le Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences, 1694 Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, et al., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 1751–1765, with the Supplément (1776–1777) and the Table analytique (1780) Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, 1866–1879
Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, 1873 (Dictionnaire) and 1877 (Supplément) Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) According to the information provided by ARTFL, the OVI textbase comprises works in prose and verse by early masters of Italian literature such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as lesser-known and obscure texts by poets, merchants, and medieval chroniclers. The OVI database was created to aid in the compilation of an historical dictionary of the Italian language, the Tesoro della lingua italiana delle origini (portions of which are now available online).Italian resources from Garzanti Please send questions, comments, and suggestions to John Logan, Literature Bibliographer. Last revised: 16 August 2022. |