REFERENCE
Backto 1997 EDUCATIONAL LINKS... by Nanis
http://c.gp.cs.cmu.edu:5103/prog/webster
Stuck for a definition of a word? Here's an online version ofWebsters famous dictionary. Key in your word and thecomprehensive definition will be promptly returned Ü if it'savailable. Oh, and make sure it's spelt right.
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http://rs6.loc.gov/wpaintro/wpahome.html
Kind of a like an American equivalent to Britain's MassObservation, the Works Progress Administration in the UnitedStates set up a project between 1936-1940 to document the livesof 'real' people. These pages hold historical information,photographs and excerpts from first person accounts (in the formof sound files) that bridge these years. They're great as basicreference material and will especially interest any Americanstudies students.
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http://www.thesaurus.com/
A searchable version of the indispensable guide to Englishwords and phrases. It's quick, easy-to-use and thecross-referencing is excellent. It's currently being updated, soshould soon be even more snazzy soon. A necessity, er, no that'snot the word I was looking forƒindispensable.
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http://www.ordsvy.gov.uk/
As absorbing as an Ordnance Survey site could be withoutwading knee deep in maps. Obviously you won't find the preciouscartographic contours of the Pathfinder or Landranger series here(details of which are held at BT's Campus World) but it's almostas good as. These are pages to pore over, to examine closely, tonote the hard graft and expertise that goes into mapping ourrural landscapes and urban terrain. There are also plenty ofsophisticated mapping products and commercial applications totake advantage of, the selling of which is presumably the site'sprimary aim. However, the amazingly diligent FAQ is fantastic,answering obscure requests from lost souls on anything fromrecord-breaking highest land points in Wales to what the wigglyred lines and dumb bell-shaped symbols mean.
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In the interests of safety Los Angeles school teachers areencouraged to recognise and understand the secretive,masonic-like gestures and hand signals as used by the studentsthey teach who are in scary Californian ghetto gangs. Bearing inmind that the consequences of forgetting to use certain signs areon a par with getting run down by a car, then there are someserious lessons to be learned. However, this guide is also greatfun if you fancy playing Bloods and Crips or, best of all, if youwant to give 'em an English inflection Ü say the Jimmy Savillethumbs up Crips-style.
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Say you wanted to find out what day your birthday fell on inthe year 2000. This calendar could look it up for you. Hardly themost sophisticated of calculations but if you state the month (bynumber) and year (it goes up to 2098) you want to examine, itpulls up the correct page.
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http://xmission.com/~jonyag/ornery.html
Indispensable pronunciation guide complete with audiocoaching. MOVED, CAN'T FIND IT IN XMISSION CLIENTS.
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http://www.ingress.com/~gail/
Handy for history lessons, this has portraits, photographsand biographies of all Britain's top royal brass. Murder,madness, religious misdemeanors and general divine-right mayhem,it goes from the conquering escapades of the Normans, through theAngevins, Plantagenets, Yorks, Tudors, Stuarts and Hanoverians,'til finally it reaches the more familiar ups and downs of ourbeloved House of Windsor. Okay, it's a big subject, butoccasionally the material is too densely written. However,ticker-taping the National Anthem across the bottom of the screengets full marks for pomp and patriotism.
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http://www.taynet.co.uk/users/tartan/
This is a great guide to all things tartan. Having anargument about whose clan has the best tartan? Well, here's agood place to settle it once and for all - you can search for atartan by district or clan and there are plenty of pictures todownload. There's also a program which displays 65 differenttartans as backgrounds. And if you want to be keep up-to-datewith clan meetings and details of new clan Web sites, there's atartan news section.
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http://www.k-net.net/~jamoss/
Stuck for a name for your little darling? Jane too plain?Yedi Moon too exotic? Well, you could always check this site out.It's a searchable list of more than 1,700 names. It's US-based,so Calvin and Candy make an appearance, but there are plenty ofgood suggestions and you can have a laugh finding out what yourmates' names mean. Our editor has assured us that Gail meansPrincess, but funnily enough it doesn't seem to say thathereƒ
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http://www.altculture.com
Calling itself 'an A-Z of the 90s - underground, online andover the counter', alt.culture is a Gen. Xers' (one generationon) dictionary of consumer signs, digital terminology andsubcultural code. The site is only up from January, to tie-inwith the American publication of a book that has been availablein the UK since November 95 'cause alt.culture was the firstnon-computer reference book to use Internet addresses, hence itsown Web site. This is where all the URLs from it will be properlymaintained. Never snide but kind of crucial in akeeping-up-with-the-coolest-kids way - from Exon to X-large Übuzzwords for the Wired generation. Cool beans.
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http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dougb/rhyme.html
Extraordinary. Internet was a little perplexed by some of therhyming slang this site came up with for its mate 'Terry'. One ofthe words that came up was something spellt 'yeiri'. To find outexactly what this meant, it seemed appropriate to follow thehotlink provided to Websters Dictionary. However, there was nodefinition and the word was unlisted, which makes one wonderwhere does Doug, creator of aforementioned Rhyming Dictionary,get his words from? Is he making them up? That aside, this is afun but silly service. Good for limericks, poems and finding outthat nothing rhymes 'orange'. Other than that we couldn't decidequite what to use it for but it definitely merits a mention. Whatrhymes with crap?
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http://www.conjelco.com/pokglossary.html
A card sharp's dictionary of definitions for those who'venever stepped inside a casino and whose only experience ofplaying poker is watching Maverick on TV. Like the play, thelanguage and slang in poker is indecipherable unless you havesomething like this. You betcha. Now you know a 'top pair' from a'showdown' and you can really play to win. Hold'em high!
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http://the-tech.mit.edu/Classics/index.html
It is arguable that a grounding in the Classics provides adeeper understanding of society today and rifling through Plato'sRepublic, Aristotle's Poetics, Homer's Iliad or even theHippocratic Oath helps to clarify the historical development ofWestern philosophy, literature, culture and thought. That's thetheory anyway. This searchable archive of 375 classical Greek andRoman texts (in English translation) utilises the most moderntechnology to open up the past. Search by author, title, date ortranslator or even a keyword.
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http://www.sci.kun.nl/thalia/rapdict/dict_en.html
What's the 411? Not much here that you won't know already ifyou've been listening to hip hop in the last few years, butdroppin' the science on yo' homies is good fun all the same.Rather unremarkably, the most number of synonyms are for cheeba,chronic, bomb, mary jane....and so on.
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http://gs213.sp.cs.cmu.edu/prog/dist
Using the University of Michigan's Geographic Name Server tofind the lattitude and longitude of two places, this site thencalculates the distance between them, as the crow flies. Won'thelp with the map reading then!
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http://www.pulitzer.org
It helps to know who's won, and what for, when you'recomposing your own speech.
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http://www.halcyon.com/dante/pap/glossary.html
A scintillating selection of language picked up in theWashington State Reformatory. Ronnie Barker never sounded likethis.
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http://sunsite.unc.edu/lunar/popanim.html
Animated scoreboard which counts heads - well actually itprobably guessing - around the world. There's one born more thanevery minute.
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http://www.eb.com
It probably makes more sense to reference the massiveEncyclopedia Britannica online rather than fork out for the wholebulky series only to have it go out of date. This very impressiveservice is free while in beta stage but the intention is toeventually launch it commercially.
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http://www.whatson.com/ukmedia
Potentially useful UK directory of Web sites and emailadresses for people in TV, radio and print.
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http://curia.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym
Before you follow IBM, TNT and HMV in intialising yourcompany's name, make sure it doesn't stand for something rude bysearching through these 12,000 acronyms.
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Yes, its really here. You'll be able to blow holes throughmany superstitions and pseudo-sciences armed with this concise,practical, dinner party deflater.
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http://tuna.uchicago.edu/ARTFL.html
This extraordinary exercise in extreme francophilia providesvarious French language and literary databases and utilities.
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http://www.vestnett.no/cgi-bin/devil
No, it's not an occult reference, but a list of cynicaldefinitions begun as a satirical weekly newspaper in 1881. Manyterms which would have been offensive in their day have now lostmuch of their venom. On the other hand, there are those whichwould get you shot by today's devotees of political correctness,but were probably harmless then.
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Rasta/Patois-to-English translations.
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http://www.willamette.edu/~tjones/Language-Page.html
An astoundingly rich digest of links to linguistic resourcessuch as dictionaries, thesauruses, poetry, publications and morein just about any language you can name, including AustralianAboriginal dialects, Esperanto, Hebrew, Manx Gaelic, Welsh andVietnamese.
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http://www.wg.omron.co.jp/cgi-bin/j-e
There are plenty of options available in thisEnglish/Japanese dictionary, allowing you to search fortranslations of words and expressions either way. You can viewtext in English and Japanese characters. There are links providedto download browsers which support Japanese text, or you candownload them as graphics. It will take a while to get started,but plenty of help is provided along the way.
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http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/
In theory you can search here for a definition of anycomputing term or acronym. However, as you will find out, thelanguage evolves all too frequently.
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http://www.kli.org/klihome.html
This earnest server is dedicated to the promotion and studyof the Klingon language - as spoken by the Star Trek Enterprise'sformer rivals. It's a crude language, without the pleasantries ofEnglish... a little like French! Even for trekkers, the qualityand sophistication of the hypertext-driven, Klingon-to-Englishaudio translator, combined with the po-faced seriousness of theexercise, will dumbfound you.
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