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

Of course, the HEL Timelines for the course should be your key resource here.
Another timeline, within a very helpful HEL course website, by Elly van Gelderen at Arizona State University. The site also has a great glossary.
Studying the History of English, a site from Duisberg-Essen University (though in English), has much interesting material to browse through.
The Linguistics Research Center (LRC) at UT Austin has lots of great information, including a great page about Indo-European Languages.
The Ethnologue seeks to catalogue and describe all of the world's languages.
Learn the phonemic alphabet from SIL (full IPA with sounds), from the Linguistics Dept. at the University of Victoria, or from the IPA itself. NOTE that some textbooks, such as Millward, use a slightly different phonetic alphabet that varies from the IPA for several consonants.
You may need to install a font or two on your computer to type the IPA or non-English characters. I recommend Cardo or Junicode or one of the "Global" fonts on this page.

Nifty Blogs

John McWhorter writes (well, it seems by now, wrote) a column for The New Republic. He now contributes to Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language and (often) pop culture from Slate.
Lingua Obscura is published by JSTOR Daily.
Word Roots is the blog for the site Vocabulary.com. The site is all about ways to discover and learn new words, and the blog discusses word histories.
Separated by a Common Language comments on American vs. British varieties of English.
LanguageHat blogs on all sorts of linguistic topics, and his page contains links to much more.

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.

Dictionaries

NOTE that Bailey Library subscribes to the Oxford English Dictionary on line for you. Get used to this as your first go-to dictionary. The link is on our course's D2L homepage.
The on-line Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus focuses on American English. You can look up a word and its etymology, but note that this is not the Unabridged Webster's.
This is an amazing resource: a full Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary and other resources.
You can find another PIE lexicon at the Linguistics Research Center at UTAustin.
Here is another Online Etymological Dictionary for looking up PIE word roots: a wise researcher will use this and and the above resources.
Bosworth & Toller is the most complete Old English dictionary. Use it to look up word roots, but of course you'll have to know the Old English version of the word first. Here is another on-line version.
The Old English Translator can give you OE versions of PDE words, and vice-versa.
The Middle English Dictionary (MED) is housed at Michigan.

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 here directly.

, and this page was last updated on or after May 2021.