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Re: OED redux



Wandering a bit farther afield, I will mention that with some regularity I need to look up jargon (tech or otherwise) and slang, either domestic or foreign.  OED is unlikely to offer much help there.  For this, I've managed to accumulate a few good reference books for my library. Another good place to start for American slang is the online  


http://www.urbandictionary.com/

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For a long time I've also had a really useful smaller paperback dictionary of common foreign words, phrases and abbreviations around here somewhere (including from the Latin), but I'm seeing that it is missing from the shelf at the moment, so I can't identify it more specifically. 


   Jordan



From: Kari Eveli
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, June 6, 2017 12:34 AM
Subject: Re: OED redux

Being a lexicographer myself, I am somewhat puzzled by the unmitigated
esteem that the OED enjoys particularly amongst my American friends. The
OED is undoubtedly one of the monuments of historical linguistics, a
branch of linguistics that I have studied quite a lot and that I find
very pertinent in its own right, but there are many other resources that
are equally helpful these days.

Here is a list of some of my favorites:

a) by issuing a "word definition" command at the google search prompt,
you will get basic defintions at once and links to major online
resources; for etymologies, use e.g. "car word origin"

b) https://www.merriam-webster.com/- a premier American dictionary with
a tradition of going a bit further in lexicographical depth than many
others, which aroused some controversy in the past of the type "this
does not belong into a dictionary"

c) www.dictionary.com and www.thesaurus.com which work very well as a
functional pair

d) www.macmillandictionary.com with distinctive British and American
variant editions side-by-side for easy reference

e) http://dictionary.cambridge.org/- an English dictionary and quite a
few of bilingual resources, etc.

f) https://www.powerthesaurus.org/- an interesting thesaurus project
for power users

g) http://www.thefreedictionary.com/- a metaresource, which pools
together a lot of dictionaries, perhaps too many to be really useful

h) http://www.onelook.com/- a metasearch engine of specialized dictionaries


i)
https://www.infoplease.com/- a general resource which has a
dictionary and a thesaurus and plenty of general information

Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx

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