Dictionary Building Resources

Dictionary Craft Tools

A practical guide for lexicographers, wordsmiths, and neologism architects.

MorDictionary does not merely define words.

We build them. We preserve them. We refine them. We sometimes invent them.

This page collects tools, communities, and reference materials useful for crafting dictionary entries, mining example sentences, and coining neologisms.

Entry Construction Tools

Corpus & Usage Research

Google Books Ngram Viewer — Google Ngram Viewer — Track historical frequency of words.
COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) — english-corpora.org/coca — Modern American English usage patterns.
British National Corpus — english-corpora.org/bnc — British English usage data.
Sketch Engine — sketchengine.eu — Advanced corpus querying tool.

Etymology Research

Online Etymology Dictionary — etymonline.com — Quick-reference etymology.
Wiktionary — wiktionary.org — Collaborative etymology chains.
Perseus Digital Library — perseus.tufts.edu — Classical Greek and Latin texts.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) — oed.com — Historical English dictionary (subscription required).
Webster’s 1828 Dictionary — webstersdictionary1828.com — Early American English reference.

Pronunciation Tools

IPA Chart — ipa chart
Forvo — forvo.com — Crowdsourced pronunciation recordings.
Wiktionary Audio Archives — commons pronunciation files

Frequency & Register Checking

Word Frequency Lists — wordfrequency.info
Google Scholar — scholar.google.com — Academic register reference.
Project Gutenberg — gutenberg.org — Literary corpora for historical usage.

Example Sentence Craft

Sentence Mining Communities

r/SentenceMiners (Reddit)
c/SentenceMiners (Lemmy)

Neologism Design

Neologism Communities

Reddit — r/NeologismsHelp
Lemmy — c/NeologismHelp
Linguistics forums and word-creation discussion groups

Recommended Dictionaries & Glossaries

General Dictionaries

Oxford English Dictionary (OED) — oed.com
Merriam-Webster — merriam-webster.com
Wiktionary — wiktionary.org
Wordnik — wordnik.com

Specialized & Historical

Green’s Dictionary of Slang — greensdictofslang.com
Webster’s 1828 Dictionary — webstersdictionary1828.com
Phrontistery — phrontistery.info — Obscure and rare vocabulary collections
The Grandiloquent Dictionary — PDF edition — Unusual and sesquipedalian words
Oxford Reference — oxfordreference.com — Subject glossaries (legal, theological, technical, etc.)

Collaborative Lexicography Philosophy

Dictionary-making is no longer confined to ivory towers, but maybe we should try to minimize the slop a smidge. I mean, I love Urban Dictionary, but sometimes it’s a bit much.

Let’s have fun, but let’s try to make a functional dictionary at the same time.

Philosophy

We oppose boring dictionaries.

A dictionary entry should:

Inform
Contextualize
Illuminate
Delight

A lexicon is not merely a record. It is a living archive of thought.