“Dictionary” by greeblie is licensed under CC BY 2.0

“Language is the archives of history.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

1. Choose a topic. (Bold Titles:)
2. Choose a source. ~ Example Source Title
3. Click on the title of the source. It is a link to the original website.

“We have strong evidence today that studying a foreign language has a ripple effect, helping to improve student performance in other subjects.”

― Richard Riley

Dictionaries (辞書):
~ Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries
~ Merriam Webster Learner’s Dictionary
~ WordReference (English-Japanese, Japanese-English, usage discussion forums)
~ Thesaurus.com (to find English synonyms)
~ American Heritage Dictionary (for advanced vocabulary, explains word origins)
~ The Idioms (Idioms Dictionary)

“I just don’t want to stop finding things interesting. I don’t want to ever stop learning. I want to be a weird encyclopedia of bizarre knowledge.”

― Brie Larson

Encyclopedias and General Topics:
~ How Stuff Works
~ Biography.com (stories about people and popular culture)
~ Atlas Obscura (stories about popular culture and history)
~ Encyclopedia Britannica
~ Wikipedia

“I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang.”

― Christopher Hitchens

Corpora:
(Advanced studies: Search databases for word and phrase usage)
~ Student Corpus: Ludwig.guru
~ British National Corpus
~ Corpus of Contemporary American English
~ Corpus of Historical American English
~ Corpus of Global Web-Based English
~ Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
~ List of other corpora

~ Speech Accent Archive (pronunciation corpus)
~ ELLLO (speaking corpus)
~ International Dialects of English Archive (speaking corpus)

“There’s an old little jingle: ‘The chief use of slang is to show that you’re one of the gang.’ What that means is that every social group has its own linguistic bonding mechanism. If there’s a group of lawyers, they have their own slang. If there’s a group of doctors, they have their own slang, and so on.”

― David Crystal

Special Research Topic: Current Slang (also see Vocabulary)
~ Urban Dictionary (not polite, but gives young people’s definitions for new slang)
~ Know Your Meme (for internet communication)
~ Texting Slang (examples: LOL, SMH, BRB)
~ The Complete List of 1500+ Common Text Abbreviations & Acronyms
~ Emojipedia – learn the English terms for emojis
~ Dictionary.com Emoji Archives (includes examples of use)
Note: Slang often becomes public on social media: Reddit, Imgur, YouTube, Instagram, et cetera. The best way to learn it is to follow young social media influencers.

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

― Albert Einstein

Open-Source Academic English Research Journals:

“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.”

― Albert Szent-Gyorgyi