MyMemory is the world’s largest collaborative translation memory. Make sure to tick the “More context” checkbox if you would like to see more context around your search term.
It is a huge repository of linguistic knowledge and
advice about English and many other languages. You should make use of
the excellent language forums, where you can ask and answer questions
about translation, semantics, and grammar.
The ability to search effectively is a professional
skill that every linguist should master. For instance, with the form on
the above page, you can find out how an exact phrase is used only on US
government websites; type the phrase in the field next to “this exact word or phrase:”, and type “.gov” in the field next to “site or domain:”.
There is practically no limit to what you can achieve with this tool.
Librairie du Liban is a major publisher of monolingual
and bilingual dictionaries in the Arab World. Now you can search most of
their premium dictionaries for free! They involve Arabic, English,
French, Spanish, and German.
Noteworthy mentions are the New Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms (En/Ar) by Ahmad Al Khatib, and The Unified Medical Dictionary (En/Fr/Ar) by M. H. Al Khayyat.
Based on Google Books data, this “corpus” was created by Mark Davies, Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University.
It has 155 billion words!
It allows you to conduct advanced searches of the Google
Books data. “You can search by word, phrase, substring, lemma, part of
speech, synonyms, and collocates (nearby words)… You can quickly and
easily compare the data in two different sections of the corpus (for
example, adjectives describing women or art or music in the 1960s-2000s
vs the 1870s-1910s).”
There are also British and Spanish corpora that you can select from the homepage.
The geeky interface has a steep learning curve, but it is worth it.
It is probably the most comprehensive dictionary of
acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms. It saves you a lot of
headaches by classifying and ranking entries according to how common or
popular they are.
You can search a great number of general dictionaries
and thesauri, specialist dictionaries, acronyms, idioms, and
encyclopedias.
A noteworthy mention is the American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition.
Available in 158 languages, it is a multilingual,
web-based project to create a free content dictionary. The largest
edition is the English Wiktionary, with over 4.1 million entries,
including words you will never find in any other dictionary.
Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven Q&A site. The link above is to the Words & Wordplay section.
At this site you can search millions of translated terms
and phrases in a collection of glossaries prepared by professional
translators.
