My Favorite Dictionaries

This will be the first of what I hope to be many blogs about my favorite websites and apps for helping with vocabulary and language skills development.

When working with older students (grades 6 and above) I don’t just want to teach them vocabulary and grammar, I want to teach them how to use resources to get information they need at any given moment for any class. I want to introduce you to two of my favorite go-tos.

The first is Onelook.com and the second is Rhymezone.com.

Starting with Onelook, you can see the main page offers a variety of ways to look up a word even if you don’t know how to spell it. There is also a Reverse Dictionary for those of us who like to do crossword puzzles. More on that later.

As an educator I appreciate that there are not any ads flashing along the top or on the sides. This makes it easier to keeps kids focused.

After you enter in your word and do a search, you get to the results page.

There is a small ad on the top of the page, but it soon disappears as you scroll down to get the information you are looking for. They are usually school appropriate. On the right you find multiple definitions and how they can be used in sentences.

I encourage my students not to take the first definition they see, but to read how the word is being used in whatever they are reading and to find the definition that fits for the context of their assignments. I will have them replace the target word with the definition to see if it makes sense.

If, for some reason, you don’t like any of the definitions you find on this page, on the left side of the page you find links to other online dictionaries that you can use to find alternative definitions for the word you are looking for. Onelook pulls from 129 online dictionaries and even offers their own Thesaurus.

Using the Reverse Dictionary is a nice option in place of using a Thesaurus. Once you click on Reverse Dictionary you enter the main page. You type in the definition or clue that you want a word for and hit enter.

This gives you a page with 100 words related to your word or phrase. You can click on these words to see their definitions. The top 11 are highlighted and usually will include the word you are looking for. However, if not, you can click on the next results box and it will give you another 100 words. You can also click on the different word category tabs in order to get just verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs depending on your word need.

Although I personally use this to do harder crossword puzzles, at work I use this when students are writing a paper and can’t think of a word to express their ideas. It’s a nice shortcut to finding a word to meet their needs.

This site provides everything you need in an online dictionary search site. But if you want more you can use Rhymezone.On Rhymezone you enter the word you want to search and, if you only want to find a rhyme, click on search.

This will give you a list of words that rhyme with your word grouped together by number of syllables. It also gives you other search options at the bottom of the lists.

Most students, upon hearing about this website, comment that they can now write rap songs. However, I use it to help them find rhyming words when working on poetry, to find synonyms and antonyms for various assignments, and to find related words so they don’t use the same word repeatedly in an assignment.

You can also look up other words and aspects of your primary word one of two ways. Either by clicking on the up and down arrows next to the words ‘find rhymes’, bringing up a pop-up menu with a variety of choices of how to search words related to your primary word, or you can do the ‘find rhymes’ search and all search options for that word are above the list of rhyming words. If a parameter is not in that area there are no words to meet that criteria (i.e. if there is not a near rhyme category, the dictionary does not find any near rhymes for your word).

Just click on the parameter you want to search and it will take you there. This saves you a click or two.The definitions link is linked to Onelook so the definitions are the same as what you would get at Onelook. Although there are some side ads on the search pages, they are small and usually school appropriate.

I have used these sites for many years and they only get better. I use both of these websites every day and recommend them to all of the teachers and students I work with.

Let me know what you think and how you might use these sites.