I’m not always a fan of one-stop shopping. Don’t get me started on the mall or the so-called superstores. But I am a fan of great resources that help copyeditors do their jobs more efficiently. The OneLook Dictionary Search is such a resource. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s worth exploring. 

With more than 19 million words included, OneLook lets you search for words or phrases (using advanced wildcards if you’d like) across all of it 1000+ indexed resources. By choosing “Customize” from the menu, you can also arrange results so a particular category is always displayed first. Categories include general, art, business, computing, medicine, miscellaneous, science, slang, sports, and technology. Choosing “Browse Dictionaries” reveals all of the indexed dictionaries and glossaries. Among other things, the info link for each will give you the resource’s URL, word count, basic description, and, if available, a search box for searching within that particular resource. The reverse dictionary feature is also helpful, especially for those times when shortness of sleep is making you forgetful of words. Searching “restaurant wine pairing,” for example, gave me sommelier as the first result—exactly the word that was refusing to come to my forebrain this morning. 

If you find that occasional (or even frequent) visits to the site aren’t enough, OneLook also has a Word of the Day feed and browser apps for your search bar and bookmarks bar.