Dictionaries

New! Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary and Stedman's Online Medical Dictionary. See below for details.

Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary
Use the world's largest, most comprehensive American English dictionary to find the definitions of words and check your spelling. Look up words by language of origin, date of first use, or part of speech. Find examples of words used in context. The "reverse" dictionary lets you look up words when you remember what a word means, but not the word itself. Merriam-Webster Unabridged is based on Webster's Third New International Dictionary and includes thousands of additional words and supplemental information since the publication of the Third New International.
  • Access restrictions: Available to SWOSU students, faculty, and staff.
  • If you're not affiliated with SWOSU, try Merriam-Webster Online.
Oxford English Dictionary
The OED is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources.
  • Access restrictions: Available to SWOSU students, faculty, and staff on and off campus.
Oxford Reference (including Literature and Western Civilization Collections)
This resource contains titles from the Oxford Companion series, as well as
  • 130+ subject dictionaries and the Oxford World Encyclopedia
  • English dictionaries, and bilingual dictionaries of French, German, Spanish, and Italian
  • Timelines linking over 2,000 key events in 20th-century history
  • 12,000 images and 500+ color maps
  • Access restrictions: Available to SWOSU students, faculty, and staff on and off campus.
  • Full text
Stedman's Online Medical Dictionary
Stedman's Online Medical Dictionary is a reliable resource for pharmacy and nursing students, educators, researchers, and medical language specialists. Stedman's contains more than 100,000 terms and definitions and approximately 1,500 images and illustrations. Stedman's Online also incorporates these titles:
  • Stedman's Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions and Nursing
  • Stedman's Medical Dictionary for the Dental Professions
  • Stedman's Pocket Medical Dictionary
  • Stedman's Medical Abbreviations, Acronyms and Symbols
  • Access restrictions: Available to SWOSU students, faculty.
  • Simultaneous users: 10
Wordsmyth
A dictionary that emphasizes clarity, simplicity, and precision of style in its definitions. It includes an integrated thesaurus.
  • Access restrictions: None. Some features require registration.