The alt.usage.english FAQ   

• Online dictionaries

  (Recommended Books)
  
  You *cannot* access the OED online, unless you or your institution has paid to do so. The second edition is copyright, and allowing public access to it would be *illegal*. A public-access version of the first edition is conceivable, but I don't know of one.
  
  The OED is available on CD-ROM for PCs. Check AddAll for current prices.
  
  If you want to submit citations for the next edition of the OED, you can contact the OED staff directly at "oed3@oup.co.uk".
  
  The online OED is encoded with the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which is ISO 8879:1986 and is discussed in obscure detail on the comp.text.sgml newsgroup. The funny-looking escape codes beginning with "&" are known as "text entity references". The ISO has defined a slew of such for use with SGML: publishing symbols, math and scientific symbols, and so on. A good place to start learning about SGML is "A Gentle Introduction to SGML" at http://etext.virginia.edu/bin/tei-tocs?div=DIV1&id=SG. There's also the book _Industrial-Strength SGML: An Introduction to Enterprise Publishing_ by Truly Donovan (Prentice Hall, 1996, ISBN 0-13-216243-1).
  
  Merriam-Webster's MWCD10 is publicly accessible at http://www.m-w.com.
  
  Project Gutenberg has put out two versions of an unabridged dictionary published early in this century by the company that is now Merriam-Webster. One version is in HTML format and comes to 45 Mb when unZIPed. The other is plain text and comes in several ZIP files with names such as pgwXX04.ZIP, where the XX are the initial letters of words included. All are available through http://promo.net/pg/.
  
  Any "Webster" dictionary that you find anywhere else on the Net is probably an out-of-date bootleg. Keep in mind that any dictionary containing such words as "beat.nik" and "tran.sis.tor" is too recent to be in the public domain.
  
  The Macquarie dictionary is accessible online at http://www.dict.mq.edu.au.
  
  Roget's Thesaurus can be found at Bartleby.com
  
  An interesting "Word of the Day" service is the one run by Merriam-Webster at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl; it can also be subscribed to by e-mail. Other Word-of-the-Day services are at http://www.wordsmith.org (run by Anu Garg, who also offers dictionary, thesaurus, acronym, and anagram services by e-mail), and http://www.parlez.com/word-of-the-day, [...]
  
  The results from Ask Jeeves also give an impressive list of "word of the day" resources.
  
  Source: [Mark Israel, 'Recommended Books: Online dictionaries', The alt.usage.english FAQ file,(line 526), (29 Sept 1997)]
  
  Note: The University of Macau actively maintains a "Dictionaries and Vocabularies" page. There are also dictionary links at the yaelf site.
  
  

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