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Wordorigins.org A list of words and phrases with links to the definitions and origins, the discussion board to ask a question or put in your two cents. Also monthly newsletter, A Way with Words. The newsletter addresses etymology, slang, grammar and usage, and general topics regarding words and language.
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Online Etymology Dictionary - the basic sources of this work are Weekley's "An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English," Klein's "A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language," "Oxford English Dictionary" (second edition), "Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology," Kluge's "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache," Ayto's "20th Century Words," and Chapman's "Dictionary of American Slang."
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The King’s English by H.W. Fowler — full text of the second edition of this classic reference plus searchable All English Usage, Modern Usage, American English, Strunk’s Style and Fowler’s King’s English
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VIEW: VARIATION IN ENGLISH WORDS AND PHRASES - 100 million word British National Corpus. You can search for words and phrases by exact word or phrase, wildcard or part of speech, or combinations of these. You can also search for surrounding words (collocates) within a ten-word window and compare between synonyms and other semantically-related words.
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Double-Tongued Word Wrester records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language.
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Ask Oxford — experts provide answers to various language related questions
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The Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - based on the manuscript collections of the late Joseph Bosworth, D.D. F.R.S. Original dictionary was published in 1898, on-line project is work in progress and based on volunteer contributions.
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Wordcounter - ranks the most frequently used words in any given body of text. Use this to see what words you overuse or just to find some keywords from a document.
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WordCount™ - an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®.
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Confusing Words - a collection of 3210 words that are troublesome to readers and writers. Words are grouped according to the way they are most often confused or misused.
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