100 sites for fiction writers: #50 - OneLook Dictionary Search

This is an ongoing series looking at websites that can be of help to fiction writers with their craft and career.

OneLook Dictionary Search

If you've been writing any length of time, more than likely you have settled upon a favorite dictionary and other resource books and online sources. My personal favorite dictionary in print is The American Heritage Dictionary, while I keep things simple online and stick with Dictionary.com for the most part. But from time to time I run across or need a word that isn't readily available in known dictionaries. At that point, I turn to OneLook Dictionary Search.

OneLook is basically a search engine of dictionary. As of this writing the site indexes more than 1,063 online dictionaries, and if you can't find a word in all that then the word likely doesn't exist.

You can stick to the basic search platform with OneLook, or you can perform a few other tasks at the site. If you want, you can Browse each of those 1,063 dictionaries individually. You can do a general search of all the dictionaries but you can also browse those dictionaries by their type, such as Art or Slang or Sports, etc. You can even search by languages, including English, Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian and German.

But what if you have a word on the tip of your tongue but just can't remember what it is? In that instance, you might want to try out the site's Reverse Dictionary. The Reverse Dictionary allows you to query with information, such as asking questions or supplying a definition when you don't know a word, then a list of appropriate and related words are provided.

You can even Customize OneLook settings to help make your searches at the site more friendly for you.