Oxford University Press has recently updated its OED Online website and added the contents of the monumental Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (which I blogged about before). It’s quite amazing that a reference work that took over 40 years to create can be put online in one year. Many public and school libraries have Oxford Online subscriptions, and you may be able to access it through your library’s website. Otherwise it costs about as much for a one-year subscription as to buy the gigantic two-volume set. It doesn’t seem to be available to buy in digital format, but perhaps that is coming later. I must confess that the books are very large and heavy, and the (necessary) semantic organization makes finding words a bit slow, so frequent users would probably find an electronic version much more convenient.
For something a little lighter, try Save the Words, a quirky web page from Oxford Dictionaries. It presents a cornucopia of worthy words in danger of extinction who are (audibly) begging to be adopted and saved. It’s great fun for all the linguistic inveteratists out there.
