HDEL - Helpful Websites


This list of sites is by no means comprehensive; with a little bit of surfing, you will be able to find much more. BE careful; make sure your source has some authority. The web is a morass of redundancies (and often trash) in which it can be hard to find an original, authoritative idea. Please let me know about any problems on this page.


General Resources


Dictionaries


Databases

  • ・The BYU Corpora collect immense sets of data about various Englishes around the world. There are some videos on The Grammar Lab on YouTube that explain how to use it. There is a bit of a learning curve to these, but they are well worth your time.
  • ・The Google Books corpus of American or British English. BYU has developed this search tool on top of the dataset that Google has made available from scanning books, which it used to create its N-Gram viewer. It allows for more complex sets of searches.
  • ・Search Google's N-Grams from here.

    Nifty Blogs


    Podcasts

    • ・The History of English Podcast by Kevin Stroud includes a number of fascinating episodes. He spends a lot of time on each moment, often using an historical text as a platform to describe word histories. As I write this there are 97 episodes, and he's up to the Magna Carta, during Early Middle English period. The same podcaster also produced a podcast about the History of the Alphabet.
    • ・I've mentioned Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language and (often) pop culture.
    • A Way with Words is a radio show about language new and old that you can listen to in podcast form. The shows are broken up into clips so you can pick and choose what you want to learn about.