Free Dictionary

The thefreedictionary.com claims to be: English, Medical, Legal, Financial, and Computer Dictionaries, Thesaurus, Acronyms, Idioms, Encyclopedia, a Literature Reference Library, and a Search Engine all in one! And indeed, just the customizable home page, which strangely resembles My Yahoo, offers a wealth of resources a writer can mine:

Word of the Day
Article of the Day
Quotation of the Day
News
This Day in History
Famous Person's Birthday

not to mention a couple of games, horoscope and the weather report. A flexible search engine at the top of the page allow you to search this website, Google, Yellow or White Pages, eBay and Amazon for a variety of useful formats including a word or article, text, or by parts of a word. The website has a Wikipedia entry apparently written by the owners, the Farlex company, who state:

The site contains copyrighted material, trademarks, and other proprietary information. You may use the content of up to 10 articles from the site without an express permission from the publisher provided a clear reference to the source of information is given. If the information is placed on a web site, a link to the source or home page is required.

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