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@xxxxxxxxxx
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