Until recently, I've always used the www.dictionary.com to look up words while writing papers or anything for that matter and it is fine for a simple dictionary. However, I've discovered two more free online dictionary tools that I favor over my previous:
The first one is http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ , which is the Cambridge online dictionary. What I love about this dictionary is that is gives you a large supply of synonyms for your word as well as displaying them in visual form known as a "visual thesaurus." I also like that it gives you sentence with that word used in it.
Cambridge's Visual Thesaurus
The second website I just learned about last night in class is www.onelook.com, which is called OneLook Dictionary Search. This website searches the internet (so you don't have to) for a multitude of online dictionaries to find ALL the meanings of the word you searched for. This is great if you want a comprehensive search of a word - meanings from multiple sources provide reliability as well giving you more ideas on how to use the word. It has this great feature that allows you to do a reverse look-up as well. That is quite neat - looking to find a single word when you have a group of words. This sounds perfect for writing poetry!
Since I was an English major in undergrad I knew about a fantastic resource called the Oxford English Dictionary. This comprehensive dictionary gives you the history of each word - in other words what is the oldest source of written works this word was used in. So it tells you the country of origin and older meanings of the word and it gives you the paragraph or multiple paragraph of where it was first found. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to use it. Your public library might subscribe, which gives you the access too, but I am not sure how many do!!! If you are in college or work for a college than you most likely 99% of the time have access to it through your school libraries website,
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