Almanac eBooks, Quotation and Other General Reference eSources

A straightforward and accessible A-Z guide to the diverse and often complex terminology of English grammar. Includes clear and concise definitions which are enhanced by numerous example sentences, as well as relevant quotations from the scholarly literature of the field.

Did you know that the English language has over 150 words for the adjective "drunk" developed over 1,000 years? Be prepared to learn words you have never heard before, find out fascinating facts behind everyday words, and be surprised at how lively and varied the English language can be.Published to critical acclaim in 2009, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is the first comprehensive thesaurus in the world to arrange words by meaning in order of first recorded use.

With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of this book-now renamed Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU)-reflects usage lexicography at its finest. Garner explains the nuances of grammar and vocabulary with thoroughness, finesse, and wit.

This dictionary is the first comprehensive description of Shakespearean original pronunication (OP), enabling practitioners to deal with any queries about the pronunciation of individual words. It includes all the words in the First Folio, transcribed using IPA, and the accompanying website hosts sound files as a further aid to pronunciation. It also includes the main sources of evidence in the texts, notably all spelling variants (along with a frequency count foreach variant) and all rhymes (including those occurring elsewhere in the canon, such as the Sonnets and long poems).

The story of how American Sign Language (ASL) came to be is almost mythic. In the early 19th century, a hearing American reverend, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, met a Deaf French educator, Laurent Clerc, who agreed to come to the United States and help establish the first school in America to use sign language to teach deaf children. The trail of ASL's development meanders at this point. No documentation of early ASL was published until the late 19th century, almost seven decades after the school's founding. While there are many missing pieces in the history of America's sign language, plenty of data exist regarding ASL etymology.

This new kind of dictionary reflects the use of “rhythm rhymes” by rappers, poets, and songwriters of today. Users can look up words to find collections of words that have the same rhythm as the original and are useable in ways that are familiar to us in everything from vers libre poetry to the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan and hip hop groups.

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is an A-Z reference book, giving an up-to-date account of the debatable issues of English usage and written style. Its advice draws on a wealth of recent research and data from very large corpora of American and British English - illuminating their many divergences and also points of convergence on which international English can be based.

From writing poems to writing birthday cards, and from the garrett to the classroom, the New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary has what every writer (or budding writer) needs. It contains rhymes for over 45,000 words, including proper names, place names, and foreign terms used in English.