Owner Farlex, Inc. Alexa rank 472 (February 2017) | Website TheFreeDictionary.com Registration Optional | |
Type of site Online dictionary and encyclopedia Available in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, Arabic, Polish, Turkish, Russian | ||
TheFreeDictionary.com is an American online dictionary and encyclopedia that gathers information from a variety of sources.
Contents
Content
The site cross-references the contents of the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the Columbia Encyclopedia, the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, the Hutchinson Encyclopedia (subscription) and Wikipedia, as well as the Acronym Finder database, several financial dictionaries, legal dictionaries and other content.
It has a feature that 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.
Site operator
The site is run by Farlex, Inc., located in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania.
Farlex also maintains a 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 definition-of.com, a community dictionary of slang and other terms.
Mirroring Wikipedia
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
TheFreeLibrary.com is a free reference website that offers full-text versions of classic literary works by hundreds of authors. It is also a news aggregator, offering articles from a large collection of periodicals containing over four million articles dating back to 1984. Newly published articles are added to the site daily. The site comprises a selection of articles from open-access journals that can in many cases also be found on a journal's own website. Many articles from the disgraced UK based Trinity Mirror Group, a producer of several tabloid newspapers, are to be found on the site.
It is a sister site to TheFreeDictionary.com and usage examples in the form of "references in classic literature" taken from the site's collection are used on TheFreeDictionary.com's definition pages. In addition, double-clicking on a word in the site's collection of reference materials brings up the word's definition on TheFreeDictionary.com.