Resources
From Category: Reference Sites
OnlineConversion.com
Conversion calculators for currency, clothing, cooking, computers, and weights and measures of all kinds. A gigabyte, for example, is 1,024 megabytes. The year MCMLXXXXIX is 1999. And in the kitchen, six drops make a pinch.
Onym
Onym's reference site collects resources to help you generate catchy and appropriate names for fictional characters, places, or products. In addition to the usual dictionaries, thesaurus, and baby name lists, Onym includes profession-specific glossaries (e.g. legal, nautical, and mathematical terms), historic slang, world mythology, and random word generators. (However, political sensitivity and avoiding cultural appropriation are up to you.)
Open Culture
Educational media website Open Culture provides this archive of over 500 literary classics available as free e-book downloads for your computer or mobile device. Genres include poetry, literary novels, science fiction, philosophy, and children's stories. There are also links to other free e-book libraries.
Outspoken: Oral History from LGBTQ Pioneers
Outspoken is an online archive of Steven F. Dansky's video interviews with leaders and elders in the queer community. Its goal is to preserve the grassroots history of LGBTQ life and the battle for equal rights following the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Writers will find this useful for historical fiction and nonfiction research.
OWL’s Starting Points for Internet Research
Purdue's Online Writing Lab has plucked out some of the more interesting links to research sites on the web. The English and Journalism categories will be of special interest to writers. The Voice of the Shuttle is particularly well regarded for humanities research.
Poets’ Graves
The final haunts of your favorite poets, with special attention to those buried in England. Search by name or region. Includes short biographies and links to classic poems.
Queer Comics Database
The Queer Comics Database is an online guide to contemporary graphic narratives with LGBTQ content or creators. It is searchable by author name, genre, ethnicity, queer identity, art style, and tone (from "action-packed" to "tranquil"). Find your next good read here.
Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP)
The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) was first launched in November 2003 in an effort to preserve queer zines and make them available to other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest DIY publishing and underground queer communities. Browse alphabetically or search for people, places, time periods, and themes.
Radical Copyeditor
The Radical Copyeditor is a blog and editing service that keeps writers up-to-date on respectful ways to write about marginalized communities. Tips include recognizing biased reporting, a style guide for referring to transgender and nonbinary people, and unpacking the politics behind buzzwords like "alt-right" and "politically correct".
Rare Children’s Books Digital Archive at the Library of Congress
To celebrate the centennial of Children's Book Week in 2019, the US Library of Congress has made available a free digital collection of 100+ out-of-print, public-domain children's books from before 1924. These historically significant works include examples of the work of American illustrators such as W.W. Denslow, Peter Newell, and Howard Pyle, as well as works by renowned English illustrators Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane, and Kate Greenaway.
Rhyme Desk
Rhyme Desk is an interactive writing tool for poets, songwriters, and copywriters. Type in a word or phrase, then use the search buttons to count syllables, generate exact and slant rhymes, or find synonyms and antonyms. You can also use it to share your writing on Facebook and Twitter.
SharpWriter.Com
Links to dozens of online dictionaries, grammar and style guides, and copyright advice sites are among the most useful features of this website maintained by horror/suspense novelist John T. Cullen.
Somewhere in Time
These amusing columns from Vulture.com music critic Dave Holmes are useful for writers researching popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s. They're also a humbling reminder of how quickly our favorite media seems dated. Trend-chasers beware.
The Free Dictionary
Comprehensive general-interest and specialized dictionaries (e.g. medical, legal) plus a thesaurus and encyclopedia. Convenient cross-links help you bone up on a subject quickly. Culture and Fine Arts section includes introductions to poetry, literature, theater and the classics.
The Hive Index
The Hive Index is a directory of 900+ online communities, searchable by keyword. Use it to find writing and publishing discussion boards on social media, or to join groups on a topic that you're writing about.
The Reanimation Library
Unique online archive of quirky diagrams and illustrations from outdated reference books, which the library makes available for writers and visual artists to appropriate in their own work (within the bounds of copyright law). Interested in tennis manuals from 1948? How about 'Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit'? For those with an offbeat sense of humor, the possibilities are endless. The library was started in 2002 by Andrew Beccone, contributing editor of the literary journal jubilat.
The Web of Language
The Web of Language is Dennis Baron's blog focusing on newsworthy issues in grammar, language usage, and technology. Topics include the history of gender-neutral pronouns, America's politically motivated bans on using foreign languages, what makes a brand name a racial slur, and the interpretation of hate-crimes statutes.
Tip of My Tongue
Search this database of dictionaries for that word you can't quite remember. You can input meanings, syllables, sound-alikes, and letters that it should or shouldn't include. This free reference site is created and maintained by writer and software designer. Chirag Mehta
Too Much Horror Fiction
Will Errickson is the co-author, with Grady Hendrix, of Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction (Quirk Books, 2017), a popular history of the pulp horror paperback in its heyday. Errickson's blog reviews notable and campy titles from the 1960s-90s, a number of which are being reissued now by Valancourt Books.
Trans Journalists Association Stylebook and Coverage Guide
The Trans Journalists Association has created this free online style guide for editors and journalists who write about transgender people and the stories that affect them. It includes guidance on name and pronoun usage, education about commonly repeated inaccuracies and politically contentious phrasing, and editorial best practices for centering trans voices.
UCLA Children’s Book Collection
The UCLA Children's Book Collection online archive offers free downloads of over 1,800 digital titles, from classics like Little Women and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to lesser-known public domain works from the 19th century and earlier.
University of Arizona Poetry Center
The website of the University of Arizona Poetry Center features reference materials such as a digitized collection of writers' portrait photos, a blog with articles and interviews about poetry and education, and a basic guide to the poetry publication process.
University of Toronto’s Glossary of Poetic Terms
Brief definitions of poetic forms and literary devices from Acatalectic to Zeugma.
US Font Map: The United Fonts of America
This entertaining article at The Statesider shows a map of 222 typographical fonts named after US locations, some with quirky stories behind them. (For instance, Georgia, one of the more common fonts used today, got its name from a tabloid headline that read "Alien Heads Found in Georgia"!)
US Legal Forms
Clearinghouse for over 36,000 legal forms that are free or available for purchase online. Includes state-specific forms. Writers will appreciate the templates for contracts, rights assignments and intellectual property filings.
Visual Thesaurus
Each word you enter links to other words in a fascinating, shifting web. Great brainstorming tool.
Websites and Blogs About the English Language
At her blog English in Progress, educator and translator Heddwen Newton maintains this list of her favorite websites for word nerds. Links include style blogs, etymology resources, and news sites covering linguistic trends.
Weird Old Book Finder
This quirky search engine designed by tech writer Clive Thompson browses Google Books to show public-domain books from the 18th century to the 1920s, one at a time, based on your search terms. Rather than a straighforward research tool, it's a vehicle for finding unusual texts and illustrations to spark your imagination. Before using it, read Thompson's blog post about how to get the most out of your search.
WordDB Rhyming Dictionary
WordDB is a free reference site that includes crossword puzzle clues, thesaurus, antonyms, and a Scrabble wordfinder. Their main product is the Rhyming Dictionary, with hundreds of rhymes for over 350,000 words and phrases. Think there's no rhyme for "orange"? Check out their suggestions, based on a variety of accents and syllable pronunciation speeds.
Wordnik
Crowd-sourced online dictionary allows readers to supplement existing definitions and suggest new words for inclusion. The site also tracks how words are being used in tags and captions at online photo- and video-sharing sites. Additional fun features include a random word-of-the-day generator and a counter for each word's value in Scrabble points.
Wordsworth
Created by Marissa Skudlarek, Wordsworth is a free online search tool that helps writers of historical fiction use period-appropriate language. You can compare a passage from your story to a corpus of fiction from the decade you're writing about, or look up whether a specific phrase is found in fiction from that decade. Wordsworth's database of comparison texts currently features (mostly British) classics written from 1801-1923. More texts after this date will be added when their US copyright expires.
WordTips Guide to Grammar and Punctuation
WordTips features several free resources to help with writing skills, anagrams and word puzzles, and Scrabble vocabulary. This page gives an overview of grammar and punctuation rules, plus links to many other sites with more detail on these topics. Clear, simple presentation makes it a suitable resource for middle- and high-school students.
Writer’s Knowledge Base
Created by Hiveword, the Writer's Knowledge Base search engine indexes over 40,000 online articles on the craft and business of writing. Search by keyword or browse by category.
