BEV BUTULA: OneLook Dictionary

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This is a fun and potentially useful website. OneLook Dictionary is a website that searches numerous online dictionaries (both general and topical) at one time. The website’s index includes over 1000 dictionaries covering topics ranging from general usage, to law, to art, to business, to technology, to medicine.

Entering a word into the search box will produce a general definition, along with a list of links to the various dictionaries that define your term. A very nice feature of this engine is its ability to support a variety of advanced search wildcards. The various search options are listed on the homepage and detailed in the FAQs.

OneLook also provides a reverse dictionary search; you enter in a concept and the engine offers possible words. It should be noted that a few of the dictionary links I followed were “dead,” so I am not sure how often the site checks its links.

For those of you who used the Google “define” operator to accomplish this type of dictionary search, it appears that functionality ceased working in May. According to the Google Operating System Blog, Google did add a “dictionary” option to its sidebar search options.

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