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Reference Resources - Encyclopedias, dictionaries and handbooks

The library provides access to thousands of online reference titles. This guide incudes conversion calculators, statistics, company data, directories and more.

Dictionaries and Thesauri

Oxford Reference Online
The Oxford web site describes Oxford Reference Online as: "The Core Collection contains about 100 dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press."

The Oxford English Dictionary - online
The Oxford English Dictionary - online covers words from across the English-speaking world and is a "guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both past and present."

Macquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus
The most up-to-date Australian dictionary and thesaurus available.

Merriam-Webster Online
This site provides access to both a dictionary and a thesaurus.

Credo Reference
"Credo Reference is a full-text online reference service and includes over three million entries from hundreds of well-regarded titles from some of the world's best reference publishers. Credo’s collection is intelligently integrated with millions of cross-references and contains dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias, quotations and atlases, plus a wide range of subject-specific titles covering everything from art to accountancy, science to Shakespeare and law to literature"


Acronyms and Abbreviations

University College Cork
You can search the database for an acronym (eg IEEE) or for a word in the expanded acronym (eg Engineers) to see related acronyms.

Acronym Finder
Dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms. Searching over 2,431,000 definitions

International Science Indexing (ISI) Journal Title Abbreviations
List of abbreviations used for journal titles.


Quotations

Bartleby.com
According to the site, "Bartleby.com combines the best of both contemporary and classic quotations collections into a searchable database of over 87,000 entries, the largest of its kind ever compiled."

The Quotations Page
A searchable database of over 23,000 quotations.

Famous Quotes and Authors
A searchable website of over 25,000 famous quotations.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
University of Columbia
This site, part of Project Bartleby, provides for searching or browsing of the 1901 edition. Quotations are searchable by author and keyword. Keyword indexing uses connecting words, such as and and or.