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The Century Dictionary Online



If you want an awesome online dictionary, go to
  http://www.global-language.com/
and click on "Century Dictionary".  That will take you to
  http://216.156.253.178/CENTURY/index.html
which says in part:
... presents the magnificent Century Dictionary, perhaps the most beautiful authoritative dictionary of all time, in DjVu (tm) format.
.... The Century Dictionary Online is now the largest freely available dictionary on the World Wide Web. Because DjVu images can be zoomed to 999%, it is also in effect the only comprehensive "large print" dictionary on the web. The entire text - 12 volumes, more than 10,000 pages, more than 500,000 definitions, 22 million searchable words, a biographical Cyclopedia, and a colorful world atlas - is now available. With a user interface that includes headword browsing and lookup as well as fast full text searches made possible by DjVu's OCR capabilities, The Century Dictionary Online offers users a real experience of déjà vu, a chance to reëxperience the legendary beauty and renowned scholarship of The Century Dictionary in all its particulars and yet in ways never possible before.

 
For example, you will find scholarly definitions and etymologies for
        -- epagomenal
        -- iris
and other words that lesser dictionaries can't handle.  OTOH bear in mind that this dates from 1889, so if you look up words like "laser" and "computer" you're gonna get funny results.

For more information see
  http://216.156.253.178/CENTURY/aboutcentury.html
and
  http://216.156.253.178/CENTURY/why.php
which begins:
A NUMBER of people have asked us why we have gone to all this trouble to put a hundred-year-old dictionary on the World Wide Web. The answer can be summed up in three words: it's free, it's big, and it's beautiful. ....