What are your favorite English language tools? [closed]

Solution 1:

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

This is a great tool for finding out how words are actually used in different registers of English, ranging from informal spoken English to formal academic written English. In this answer I used it to find out if the word prepone was used with any regularity in American English (it is not). In this answer, I used it to compare incidences of “an historic” with “a historic”, to see if one is used orders of magnitude more frequently than the other (almost four to one in favor of “a historic”).

It is also useful for researching collocates—which words frequently go with other words. For example, in this answer I used it to compare “on the bus” with “in the bus” (“in the bus” is used sometimes when the bus is stationary). In this answer I used it the part-of-speech searching ability to compare how frequently none was used with a singular and plural verb forms (two to one in favor of plural).

Overall, COCA is a very useful tool for researching how the language is actually used, not only for debunking myths about language, but also for learning something new about how the language works.

Solution 2:

Language Log

Language Log is a collaborative blog about language, most of whose contributors are academic linguists. It is one of the most popular blogs about linguistics, and there are often posts that directly address questions asked here. For example, there were a number of informative posts on singular they I linked to in this answer, and Mark Liberman’s post about the mythical rule forbidding beginning sentences with conjunctions was informative in this answer to the question “Why is it bad to start a sentence with and?”