Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Reference & Learning

Links relating to reference materials and e-learning providers. Includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, style and usage guides, quotations, online schools and courses, historic documents, libraries, data services, and more.

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DictionariesE-LearningEncyclopediasLibrariesMiscQuotationsStyle & UsageThesauruses

What are words? Here are some general English-language references that will tell you. Most are general; some are topic-specific.

Online e-learning providers with courses in all kinds of subjects.

  • Crash Course
    Provider of “high quality educational videos . . . available to everyone for free.”
  • FEMA Emergency Management Institute
    FEMA independent study programs available to the general public.
  • Khan Academy
    Organization whose “mission is to provide a free, world‑class education for anyone, anywhere.”
  • LinkedIn Learning
    Online learning and career development platform from Microsoft (formerly Lynda.com).
  • MIT OpenCourseWare
    A “free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum.”
  • Skillshare
    An “online learning community with thousands of classes for creative and curious people.”
  • TRAIN Virginia (VDH)
    Virginia Dept. of Health e-learning platform for public health training via the Public Health Foundation.
  • Universal Class
    Provider of online classes in many subjects; freely accessible with a library card number.
  • Wikiversity
    Provider of “learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education.”

General purpose, in-depth research sources including modern and classic encyclopedias.

  • Encyclopedia Britannica
    Encyclopedia with “hundreds of thousands of objective articles, biographies, videos, and images from experts.”
  • Encyclopedia Virginia
    A “a reliable and user-friendly resource on the history and culture of Virginia” by Virginia Humanities and the Library of Virginia.
  • Encyclopedia.com
    Encyclopedia content from sources like Oxford University Press, Columbia Encyclopedia, and Cengage.
  • Grokipedia
    Encyclopedia generated and fact-checked by an xAI large language model (LLM); partially based on Wikipedia.
  • Scholarpedia
    A “peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia, where knowledge is curated by communities of experts.”
  • The Free Dictionary – Encyclopedia
    Free encyclopedia content from The Free Dictionary by Farlex.
  • Wikipedia
    Community-built, crowdsourced “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

Links to physical and virtual libraries, both government-operated and private, most with online database services.

Miscellaneous reference links including data, topic-specific sources that don’t fit elsewhere, etc.

  • Acronym Finder
    The “world’s largest and most comprehensive dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms.”
  • Data.gov
    Official “open data site” of the U.S. Government; managed by the General Services Administration (GSA).
  • Internet Archive (Archive.org)
    A “non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more.”
  • Know Your Meme
    A website “that researches and documents Internet memes and viral phenomena.”
  • MedLine Plus
    An “online health information resource” by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
  • Oxford Reference (Library of Virginia)
    Expansive database of “the best of Oxford University Press’s reference titles” (Library of Virginia account required).
  • Urban Dictionary
    A largely uncensored, often obscene reference to slang, jargon, and things you don’t find in normal dictionaries.
  • WikiArt
    The “online home for visual arts” with a goal “to make world’s art accessible to anyone and anywhere.”
  • Wikidata
    A “free knowledge base . . . [of] data items that anyone can edit.”
  • Wolfram|Alpha
    A “knowledge engine” intended to make “all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.”

I love a good quote, but stop making up attributions. Do your research. Here are some good places.

General references about English style and usage. Learn the rules so you know when to break them.

At times you possess a term, but you demand a variant rendition. A credible thesaurus can supply a conclusion to this dilemma.

  • Merriam-Webster – Thesaurus
    An “indispensable English language reference” with “millions of synonyms, similar words, and antonyms.”
  • Pocket Oxford American Thesaurus (Library of Virginia)
    A thesaurus that “stands on the shoulders of the colossal Oxford English Corpus” (Library of Virginia account required).
  • The Free Thesaurus
    A free thesaurus from Farlex; based on the Collins Thesaurus, Roget’s Thesaurus, and WordNet.
  • Thesaurus.com
    The “premier thesaurus on the web” with “over 550,000 synonyms and a suite of tools that simplify the writing process.”
  • Wiktionary
    A “a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary” in English. Also includes etymology and thesaurus.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.