(Part 2) Best english dictionaries according to redditors

The Oxford English Dictionary

It's slow at first, but it starts picking up at about E.

This teacher has expressed enough trans/genderqueer erasure to delete several text books. This will absolutely be worth it.

EDIT: Cancelled the order from OED. Found a better offer on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Compact-Oxford-English-Dictionary-Set/dp/019861117X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426716484&sr=1-2&keywords=compact+oxford+english+dictionary

"Embassador" is a valid, but archaic, way to spell "ambassador". Source: my copy of this dictionary.

Great diagram! Anyone interested in these sort of historical linguistic patterns should look into C. D. Buck's Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principle Indo-European Languages. It's a great source!

In this case, though, Finnish 'äiti' actually has a slightly different history than one would expect, being a borrowing from Gothic 'aiþei'. While cross-language borrowings of such common, ordinarily stable words like 'mother' are rare, this is one such example.

Affordable, at least compared to other works of art!

https://www.amazon.com/Random-Dictionary-English-Language-Unabridged/dp/0394500504

Standard Dictionary (English - English - Kannada) by D.K. Bharadvaj

English-English-Kannada Oxford Dictionary
by Augarde Balasubrahmanya, Prabhu Shankar

The reference is an actual dictionary ...

If you prefer the Webster website, then that works just fine too.

It's hard to find an exact replacement for S&W, but that's only because it's not so much a language guide as an apocryphal collection of the authors' pet peeves dressed up as "advice." For a comprehensive book on usage you want something like The Cambridge Guide to English Usage.

I tried mandarin for Chinese and as someone who grew up in a native speaker household looking aiming to achieve fluency it was absolute garbage. Back when I used version 2, the grammar was completely wrong that even my father had difficulty trying to interpret what the sentences were saying.

In version 3, RS makes no attempt to explain anything, so no explanation of tones or even simple things like ni hao vs. nin hao. Much of RS is also repetitive and basic because you can only use pictures, so just different ways of phrasing a simple sentence "the boy is under the boat." The man is on the bicycle.

I wouldn't even use it for vocab building, learn to read pinyin and get

http://www.amazon.com/Frequency-Dictionary-Mandarin-Chinese-Dictionaries/dp/0415455863

Routledge's Frequency Dictionary. Take 10-20 words a day and throw them into a flashcard program. That'll be much faster than Rosetta Stone and cheaper. Chinese grammar is simple once you get the hang of it.

If you have any questions let me know.

For writing, I like the Describer's Dictionary.. It is arranged by category: a section for faces, one for shapes, one for landscapes, etc. On each left side page are examples from professional writers, and on each right page is something like a thesaurus, but solely for describing things in the given categories. It could give you a lot of ideas for how to describe paintings.

The report repeatedly states the UK is complicit in what goes on in the Oversea Territories.

So does the critically acclaimed documentary you "watched".

You keep washing your hands of it and saying "not our fault sorry"

The Spiders Web is claiming this activity should be taxed in the UK but the City is allowed to pretend it occurs elsewhere.

Remember this:

> It's about providing a legal space in which you pretend activity is taking place and the important bit about that is you pretend it's not taking place in the economy where it really is taking place. So your taking activity from the place where it's regulated and taxed and pretending that's it happening elsewhere.

Don't really see why you can't understand this?



> But reading appears to be beyond you.

A bit rich considering your track record today.

Again please pick one up:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-English-Mini-Dictionary-Dictionaries/dp/0199640963/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=dictionary&qid=1567783990&s=gateway&sr=8-1

I made this search before. All the free online stuff I found was incomplete, the websites pretty terrible.

Print-wise there seems to be three popular ones -- I own two. The first is the big, expensive (but newly updated) Cambridge Dictionary, edited by Robert Audi. (I own an older version I got on the cheap.)

There's also the more affordable and smaller Oxford, edited by Simon Blackburn (an updated version of which seems to be coming out in May). I reccomend both. Though I tend to use the Oxford more (out of habit, mostly, not for any good reason...)

There's also the Penguin, but I haven't used that. It is affordable.

Bear in mind that I basically read philosophy in my free time, so my need for research materials is modest.

Maybe he should just buy all of them : http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-English-Dictionary-Vols-1-20/dp/0198611862

Still costs a ton.
http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-English-Dictionary-vol-print/dp/0199573158/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319258754&sr=8-1

Shakespeare did have a large influence on the language, partially due to being born in the right place at the right time. Before Shakespeare's lifetime, most books printed in Europe were in Latin. During his life, England alone printed thousands of items in English, and literacy rates were rising rapidly.

The Renaissance as a whole added at least 10,000 new words to the English lexicon. As writing in the vernacular became more popular, authors borrowed words--mostly from Latin, French, Spanish, or Dutch-- to fill the holes they saw in English. But how many of these words can we credit directly to Shakespeare?
The Oxford English Dictionary claimed at least 2,000 English words were first used by the playwright. But this is in need of revision, as many of these words were actually used previously by a lesser-known author. The OED is currently being revised, a process that will take many years. But from the pages edited so far, we can conclude that around 30% of words credited to Shakespeare were actually first used by someone else.

But the true genius of William Shakespeare lies in the way he put words together, and created new metaphorical definitions for existing words. The updated OED currently claims that Shakespeare invented around 8,000 new word senses. Here is a good quote by Bernard Levin that shows many of the phrases we use today were invented by Shakespeare.

souces: The Story of English and Bad English

Y'know... the fact you don't know what the OED is speaks (ahem) volumes about your education.

This is the OED

My mistake, the two volume set also comes with a magnifying glass.

Where many English words come from, people. It's been in use for at least 100 years. It's the same old prescriptive vs descriptive debate. If interested, this is a good read: Bad English.

From that book:

Of course, there are a great many people who are not bound down to the ecclesiastical tenets, but the majority of the fashionable world adhere to the custom irregardless of their personal custom. —New York Times, February 21, 1915

Shea, Ammon (2014-06-03). Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation (Kindle Locations 892-895). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

> dictionary

Oxford has one of those too.

Welcome to OCPoetry (as commenter)! That didn't come off as ranty at all. I think we need longer (considered, earnest) comments on the internet.

Anyway, I'm not an expert by any means, just a friendly loner/devotee with a spending problem and a massive library. I've read a lot of poetry and writing about poetry -- I think that's probably the key to understanding the stuff on a deeper level as both a reader and a writer.

I'm going to be brief with this comment cause I'm at work, BUT with the addition of read, read, read, my advice to /u/grandmasterlane above stands: Spend more time with your poems. Find ways to make the poem you're working on the only thing you think about.

Additionally, buy a copy of Roget's and a good dictionary and spend lots of time in those places and on etymonline.com exploring the meaning and origin of words. I think loving words is super important. Every time you choose one word over another it has to be an act of determination, calculation, holistic consideration. Every word collides with every other word in a poem. It's a weird thing to see a masterful poet make that work. I'll try and think of a particular great example and get back to you. (Immediately I think of Wallace Stevens' "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself" a poem in which the poet uses EVERY. SINGLE. WORD. to alchemically evoke the image/experience of a sun actively rising in the reader's mind. That short poem appears in my mind because I've spent hours with it. Reading. Rereading. Defining every word that I thought I knew. Memorizing. Reciting.)

OK. That's it for now.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Frequency-Dictionary-Mandarin-Chinese-Dictionaries/dp/0415455863

I went to amazon to preorder a copy but then the price made me cry

I hope the price comes down after it is released. I would love to have a copy but it's definitely not worth over $300 to me.

How about this dress?

Or if that's too vague, how about The Describer's Dictionary?

Thanks for the contest :)

For IE languages, the obvious answer would Buck's classic Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages. Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a single source where you can find comparative etymologies on every major language family, you'll probably have to rely on at least two or three different sources. But if you find one, let me know!

Hi everyone. Extremely new Japanese learner here (Learning for a week now)
こんにちは

Information : I have all 46 Standard Hiragana Characters memorized, and about 10 simple phrases and words like こんにちは、ごめねさい、またね、and etc learned.

It's sounds like a stupid question...

but am I doing the right thing by learning the absolute entirety of the Hiragana Alphabet, (Not just the Standard 46, I have those memorized already.) before moving on to things like Grammar, Katakana, and Particles? Should I be moving on to more things at once, or am I okay learning this way? And at what point should I start studying my Dictionary https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Beginners-Japanese-Dictionary-Jonathan/dp/0199298521 to learn new words and phrases? I'm guessing after learning the rest of Hiragana, because there are a bunch of words I cannot pronounce without the Dakuon and Handakuon, etc.

Try here
The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary

link

These dictionaries are the best I've ever seen. I use the French and Spanish ones a bunch because they explain so much beyond just "bonjour = hello."

Looking it up on Amazon was the first thing I did, too. I did so expecting it to be unaffordable, though. ;)

It's even a little more expensive here in the UK.

This is commonly used too: Butcher's Copy-editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Copy-editors and Proofreaders.

This is a very good guide, but for some reason it's rarely mentioned: [The Cambridge Guide to English Usage.] (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Guide-English-Usage/dp/052162181X)

And then there's the style guides for various newspapers.

Unfortunately there isn't a British style guide that's as useful as CMOS concerning punctuation.

It's a print book, but I find that the Oxford Beginner's Japanese Dictionary always seems to have just the particle usage note I need. Every verb has a を/に/が next to it, and they anticipate tricky English/Japanese discrepancies well.

WordNet 3 (largest English dictionary and thesaurus

Link to the Japan store: http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00C4Y7ZSU

http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Dictionary-Philosophy-Quick-Reference/dp/0199541434/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1457487586&sr=8-2&keywords=dictionary+philosophy

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Dictionary-Philosophy-Robert-Audi/dp/1107643791/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457487586&sr=8-1&keywords=dictionary+philosophy

I own both. They're both good.