Subscription Databases and E-books

• Acronyms, Initialisms & Abbreviations Dictionary
  Features definitions of a wide variety of acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations and similar contractions that allows users to quickly and easily translate terms into their full names or meanings. New terms from subject areas such as associations, education, the Internet, medicine and others are now included.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
  An on-line version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that provides many full text articles with links to Web sites
• Encyclopaedia Britannica Online for Kids
  A kids on-line version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that provides many full text articles with links to Web sites.
• Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia
  Updated annually, this database features over 25,000 informative segments of the encyclopedia, with alphabetically arranged articles, illustrations and maps. The encyclopedia includes nine million words and articles embedded with colorful images.
• Green's Dictionary of Slang
  Covering five centuries of all English-speaking regions of the world, this dictionary provides impertinent, vile, censored, hip, witty, and fascinating slang words of the English language.
• Oxford English Dictionary
  The Oxford English Dictionary provides information about 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.
• Oxford Reference Online
  In Oxford Reference Online you will find a wealth of facts, figures, definitions, and translations from 170+ Oxford reference titles, including more than 50,000 additional in-depth, scholarly articles from titles in the Oxford Companions series, plus all 20,000 quotations from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
• NEW! World Book Encyclopedia
  Comprehensive access to encyclopedia articles, web links, periodical articles, videos, maps and more. Includes World Book Kids (for elementary-school students), World Book Student (middle and high-school students), and World Book Enciclopedia Estudiantil Hallazgos (a Spanish-language encylopedia).
  

Websites Selected by Librarians

Encyclopedias

• Encyclopedia.com
  A collection of online encyclopedias with pictures, facts and videos that provides reference entries from published sources like Oxford University Press and Columbia Encyclopedia.
• Wikipedia
  Is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project with millions of articles on many subjects that anyone can edit.

Dictionaries

• English Dictionaries from Diccionarios en internet
  Provides a selection of dictionaries for the English language, as well as dictionaries for other languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and more.
• The Free Dictionary
  A comprehensive collection of dictionaries by subject including medical and legal together with encyclopedias in various languages. Also includes games such as word matches, spelling bees, quotation of the day, and more.
• The Visual Dictionary
  Definitions are organized by way of image and grouped into various themes and topics.
• Wordnik: All The Words
  Is an online dictionary and language resource that provides dictionary and thesaurus content from the 2008 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Wordnik provides example sentences showing words in context. It allows users to contribute information, such as recorded pronunciations, tags, and suggestions for new words. Flickr images are used to illustrate some words.