Dictionaries, Encyclopedias and Reference Tools

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (opens to new window)

The ninth edition, published in 1901.

Cambridge History of English and American Literature New York: Putnam, 1907-21. (opens to new window)

Text is fully searchable and browsable by volume; includes indexes to chapters, authors, and bibliographies.

Handbook of Rhetorical Devices (opens to new window)

Written by Robert Harris, author of several works on rhetoric and writing effectiveness.

Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, 1st (1755)

Octavo, 2005. CD-ROM (3 discs). Digitized facsimile of the copy in the Warnock Library (Dictionary) and the Library of Congress (The plan of a dictionary). Text is searchable. Located in Electronic Information Center PCL 2.200: CDROM 2431

The King's English (opens to new window)

The classic 1908 Fowler's English Usage, from Columbia's Project Bartleby.

LION (LIterature ONline) (opens to new window)

Primarily known for full-text literary works, LION also includes a selection of reference works, including the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia, the Cambridge Encyclopedia,the Periodicals Contents Index: Literature, and Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. LION also contains a Shakespeare Glossary, found in the left sidebar of the search screens.

Literature Resource Center (opens to new window)

Electronic compilation of entries from Contemporary Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature and full-text articles from more than 20 scholarly journals. Searchable by author, title, genre, literary movement/time period, and by literary theme. All resources are searched simultaneously; to select just one or more to search, click on "custom search."

Merrriam-Webster Online Dictionary and Thesaurus (opens to new window)

Derived from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition.

Old English Corpus (opens to new window)

From the University of Michigan Humanities Text initiative.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (opens to new window)

Biographical dictionary of people of distinction in the British Isles and its colonies who died before December 31, 2000. Content includes the complete text of the new sixty-volume Oxford DNB with 50,000 biographies and 10,000 portrait illustrations as well as the complete text of the original thirty-three volume of the DNB.

Print edition available at PCL Reference DA 28 O95 2004.

Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989) (opens to new window)

Contains definitions for most of the words in the English language, with information on their origins and quotations showing their range of meanings from the time they entered the language to the present. Print edition available at PCL Reference PE 1625 O87 1989.

Oxford Reference Online (opens to new window)

Electronic editions of over 100 standard dictionaries and encyclopedias published by Oxford University Press.