List of 'gold' reference dictionaries

[jmccrae]

Sometimes, sense distinctions can only be judged by referring to other dictionaries. We should maintain a list of dictionaries whose quality we trust and can refer to.

See also #243 and #141

[arademaker]

1. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/
2. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english
3. https://www.merriam-webster.com/
4. https://www.oed.com/ (closed?)

[dcillessen]

What about the American Heritage Dictionary of English? https://www.ahdictionary.com/

[rwingerter55]

And wiktionary? https://en.wiktionary.org/

[rwingerter55]

In the context of issue #445 I looked up the definitions for the noun "event" in the dictionaries named above. FWIW, here is the number of senses given in each source:

source	Number of senses
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/event	10
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/event#Noun	9
https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=event	5
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/essential-british-english/event	2
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english-german/event	2
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/event	3 (plus 3 phrases)

[rwingerter55]

FWIW, here is the coverage of EWN definitions for concepts containing the noun show in EWN compared to some well-known dictionaries (not counting obsolete and archaic senses).

Source	no?	yes?	Total	Pct
Merriam-Webster	9	7	16	44%
American Heritage	11	5	16	31%
Wiktionary	8	2	10	20%
EWN		4	4	100%
Collins COBUILD	2	2	4	50%
Cambridge Essential British English	2		2	0%
Total	32	20	52	38%

Details see attachment.
Definitions of show noun.xlsx

[rwingerter55]

http://www.ketlab.org.uk/roget.html is an interesting interface to Roget's Thesaurus. Type in any word to see a graphical representation of its concept neighbourhood. This is the query result for "matter". On the site, you can navigate by clicking on one of the concepts displayed.

[rwingerter55]

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
including "Examples from the Corpus"

What I like:

• information provided, e.g. "(related) topics", word frequency (S2 = top 2000 spoken words; W2 = top 2000 written words)

• user-friendly presentation, e.g. two-word label to distinguish senses at a glance

[rwingerter55]

https://www.macmillandictionary.com/
https://www.macmillanthesaurus.com/

[rwingerter55]

https://ludwig.guru/

Ludwig is the first sentence search engine that helps you write better English by giving you contextualized examples taken from reliable sources.

Free 15-day trial.

[rwingerter55]

vocabulary.com uses Princeton WordNet, but adds example sentences, e.g.
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/group%20meeting

Each usage example has a source and is linked to the original text.

[rwingerter55]

Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary, e.g.
http://www.freecollocation.com/search1?word=meeting