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English Language
The 11 Rules of Grammar

http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~giaquint/grammar.htm

Another grammar reference, this site explains the eleven rules (according to the author, these are the most common errors he's seen while grading papers) and offers both correct and incorrect examples of the rules in action.

A.Word.A.Day

http://lrdc5.lrdc.pitt.edu/awad/home.html

This is the home page for the A.Word.A.Day mailing list, which sends a new word and its definition to your e-mail box each day.

The American Dialect Society

http://www.msstate.edu/Archives/ADS/

This site, dedicated to the study of North American English, offers information about ADS publications, meetings, and membership. The site also contains an online version of the Society's newsletter, a link to a Gopher site containing an index of American speech, and information about the ADS mailing list.

BritSpeak: English as a Second Language for Americans

http://pages.prodigy.com/NY/NYC/britspk/main.html

Have you ever heard anyone say, "I'll knock you up tomorrow morning"? This statement would be shocking only if you didn't realize that, to the British, the term knock up means to awaken someone by knocking on that person's door. This site attempts to clear up many such opportunities for misunderstanding, and provides a dictionary that converts British words and phrases to American and vice versa.

The Collective Nouns

http://www.lrcs.com/collectives/

If a group of fish is called a school, and a group of lions equals a pride, then what is the name of a group of whales? Would you believe a pod? This fun site catalogs well over fifty collective nouns, many of them humorous. For example, you might see a colony of penguins, a siege of herons, a bunch of things, or a giggle of girls.

Cool Word of the Day

http://www.dsu.edu/projects/word_of_day/word.html

As you might imagine, this site provides an exercise in vocabulary-building. The page's best feature is that, when the page first appears on your screen, all you see is the word itself. If you don't already know the word's meaning, click the Definition link below the word. The interface also allows you to view past words or even submit a cool word of your own.

The Electronic Beowulf

http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/English/Beowulf/

A project of the British Library and the University of Kentucky, the goal of The Electronic Beowulf is to make available, on the Web, access to digitized photographs of an early manuscript of Beowulf, one of the earliest surviving works of English literature. This project, in addition to making the manuscript much more widely available for study, would also allow the manuscript to be studied through electronic and computerized methods which would otherwise be impossible.

The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia

http://www.lib.virginia.edu/etext/ETC.html

This site contains thousands of texts, in Modern, Early Modern, and Middle English, plus French, German, Japanese, and Latin. Here you will find fiction, science fiction, poetry, theology, essays, histories, and many other types of materials. This site is excellent and thorough. Although a huge number of these texts are freely available, some texts are available only to users at the University of Virginia--the licensors of these texts have not permitted the University to make them widely available.

ENGL 310: History of the English Language

http://engserve.tamu.edu/files/linguistics/ling410/

This page is the Web-based supplement to a course taught at Texas A&M University by Dr. Anthony Aristar, a Professor of English. You will not earn course credit on the Web, but you won't be expected to sit for the mid-term or the final, either. You will, however, learn about the Indo-European and Germanic roots of English and trace the development of English from its Anglo-Saxon beginnings up through its emergence as a world language.

The Etymology of First Names

http://www.engr.uvic.ca/~mcampbel/etym.html

Aaron, Zoe, and all their friends will be interested to learn the origins and meanings of their names at this site, which will also provide plenty of ideas for parents to be.

Grammar and Style Notes

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/grammar.html

Quick! What's the difference between affect and effect? Jack Lynch has the answer and he's offered it up on this site, an online guide to the complexities of English grammar. Lynch clearly explains the difference between commonly confused words, defines terms such as dangling participle, and offers his own opinions on a variety of style issues.

The Online Books Page

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Web/books.html

Over 1500 English-language books are offered on this site, which you can search or browse by author or by title. In addition, you can browse new book listings or browse by subject. Philosophy, religion, science, computer science, literature, law, and medicine are among the subjects you can browse.

The Word Page

http://users.aol.com/jomnet/words.html

Build your vocabulary! (Or, to express it another way, Augment your lexicon!) This page offers ten new words and their definitions a week. This week's offerings included transcendental, soliloquy, aesthete, and multifarious.

WordNet

http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/

A lexical reference work, WordNet is designed to map out the relationships and connections between words and their synonyms. Created by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University, this site is being developed as an educational tool for improving vocabulary and reading comprehension.

The WWW Anagram Generator

http://csugrad.cs.vt.edu/~eburke/anagrams.html

This cool site will form an anagram from any word, name, or phrase you type in. For example, the phrase "New Riders," when anagrammed forms the phrases, "Sir, we rend" and "sewn drier," among others.