LibGuides: English: Dictionaries & Corpora

Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias

Literary Encyclopedia
Contains a steadily growing database of background information on classical and modern literature, written by specialists worldwide. It offers very good coverage of English, American, German and Russian literatures as well as substantial and increasing coverage of other regions.
Oxford Reference Online
A wealth of facts, figures, definitions, and translations found in dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press.
Green's Dictionary of Slang
Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang.
Enhanced Electronic Grammars Online
Offers comprehensive descriptions of languages from around the world. This Online Reference Work provides access to full individual grammars and also makes these available together, allowing for cross-language research of several grammars simultaneously. No new content included after 2021.
Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)
A record of American regional vocabulary and pronunciations, from Adam’s housecat to Zydeco.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World
Provides a comprehensive reference work that catalogs all the known living languages in the world today. It has been an active research project for more than 60 years. Thousands of linguists and other researchers all over the world rely on and have contributed to the Ethnologue
Oxford English Dictionary
Traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources.
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary
Digitised version of Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary.

Corpora

Coronavirus Corpus
Dating from Jan 2020 to Dec 2022, this archive is designed to be a record of the social, cultural, and economic impact of COVID-19, allowing you to see the daily frequency of words and phrases compared between 20 countries.
English-Corpora
The most widely used collection of English corpora (highly searchable collections of texts). These 19 discrete corpora represent language use in different contexts and dialects. Allows users up to 20 searches a day.