Online Dictionaries for Proofreaders and Editors

To help make things easier for you, we have reviewed the best online dictionaries for proofreaders and editors.

You can use these for proofreading across Australian English, US English, and UK English dialects. Refer back to them if you are ever in doubt of a word’s spelling, meaning or use while proofreading a document in a particular dialect.

• Cambridge Dictionary
• Oxford Dictionary
• Collins Dictionary
• http://www.oed.com/
• http://www.macmillandictionary.com/
• US English: https://www.merriam-webster.com/
• AUS English (subscription only): https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/

For more online dictionaries, including discipline and subject-specific ones such as legal or scientific dictionaries, check out this blog post. And for our guide on proofreading Canadian English, click here.

Another great tool that you can use to investigate a word’s usage is Google’s Ngram Viewer. You can use this for:

• Checking which spelling is more common between two variants
• Seeing whether a variant spelling is still common in modern English
• Comparing the use of words and spellings in British and American English
• Checking whether a term is typically capitalised

Click here for our guide on how to use Google’s Ngram Viewer as a proofreading tool.