| URL | TheFreeDictionary.com |
|---|---|
| Type of site | online dictionary and encyclopedia |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Owner | Farlex, Inc. |
TheFreeDictionary.com is an online dictionary and encyclopedia that gathers information from a variety of sources. This site cross references the contents of Wikipedia, Columbia Encyclopedia, Hutchinson Encyclopedia (subscription), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, the Acronym Finder database, several financial dictionaries, legal dictionaries, and other content.[1]
The site also has a feature which allows a user to preview an article while positioning the mouse cursor over a link. One can also double click on any word and look it up in the dictionary. The site is run by Farlex, Inc., of Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania.
Farlex Inc. also maintains the companion title TheFreeLibrary.com, an online library of out-of-copyright classic books and a collection of periodicals of over two million articles dating back to 1984, and Sex-Lexis.com, a dictionary of sexual slang and other terms.
Contents |
Wikipedia content is hosted at the sub-domain encyclopedia TheFreeDictionary.com which is excluded from search engine indexing in its entirety by Farlex with the use of meta tags. This is done to avoid duplicate content in the search engine results and prevent user traffic that would otherwise go to Wikipedia.
TheFreeLibrary.com is a free reference website that offers full-text versions of classic literary works by hundreds of authors as well as a large collection of periodicals containing over 4 million articles dating back to 1984. Newly-published articles are added to the site daily. TheFreeLibrary.com comprises a selection of articles from open-access journals that can in many cases also be found on the journal's own website.
TheFreeLibrary is a sister site to TheFreeDictionary and usage examples in the form of "references in classic literature" taken from TheFreeLibrary’s collection are used on TheFreeDictionary’s definition pages. In addition, double-clicking on a word in TheFreeLibrary’s collection of reference materials brings up the word’s definition on TheFreeDictionary.