Literature and Language
Best Subscription Databases for Literature
Additional Databases
Free-Web Sites for Literature
- Gale Literary Index (Index to Gale's print literature criticism series from which there are a number of volumes in our reference section--ask Mrs. Bachfischer for help with this if you need more literary criticism than you're finding through Destiny or in the databases.)
- Shmoop ("Entertain your brain while studying books, plays, short stories, and poems. See many sides to the argument. Find your writing groove.")
- American Transcendentalism Web (Contains biographical information and key works of the transcendentalists as well as background on the movement.)
- The Literature & Culture of the 1950s (Readings on the literature and culture of the period.)
- Representative Poetry On-Line (Includes over 4,700 poems by over 700 poets from the early medieval period to today.)
- Poetry 180 ("A poem a day for American high schools.")
- Poet's Corner (Includes over 7,000 poems by around 800 poets.)
- Poets.org (Academy of American Poets--biographies, photos, and poems for more than 4,000 poets.)
- Sonnet Central (Archive of sonnets, commentary, and relevant web sites.)
- Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts (Vast collection of the texts of folklore and myths--this site groups together the variants of certain basic stories.)
- Legends (Gateway to primary source material, personal essays, historical surveys, etc. of legends, including Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Beowulf.)
- Gifts of Speech (Speeches by influential contemporary women from around the world.)
- American Rhetoric (Speech bank of 5,000+ speeches, sermons, lectures, debates, etc.)
- Online Books Page (Links to 3,000,000+ online books.)
- Project Gutenberg (Project Gutenberg was the first producer of free electronic books.)
- Best-Selling Books--USA Today (Search by author or book title to find out how many weeks a book appeared on the best-selling chart, its peak and current positions, and the last date it appeared on the chart.)
- Based on the Book (Listing of books that have been made into movies since 1980.)
- Books in Series (Which one is next?)
- TeenInk (Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, college reviews, music reviews, and more--all written by teens.)
Free-Web Sites for Language
- YourDictionary (Hundreds of specialized English dictionaries, thesauri, foreign language dictionaries, and grammar guides, etc.)
- Merriam-Webster Online (Online Collegiate Dictionary and Collegiate Thesaurus.)
- Wordle ("Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.")
- The Owl at Purdue (Online writing lab--information to assist with writing projects.)
- Common Errors in English (By an English Professor at Washington State University.)
- Thesaurus.com
- RhymeZone (To find rhyming words, synonyms, homophones, etc.)
- Acronym Finder (Searchable database of acronyms/abbreviations and their meanings.)
- Behind the Name (Etymology and history of first names.)
- Speech Accent Archive ("The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a large variety of backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.")
Page last revised on August 10, 2023.