The majority of the Gale Databases contain the Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Some of the Gale databases, such as History Resource Center contain a geographic dictionary, Health and Wellness Resource Center contains Mosby’s Medical, Nursing, and Allied Health Dictionary, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica has the Merriam Webster’s Thesaurus. More tips on dbs, using word variants, Google.com to follow by clicking on the link below the labels.
Grolier’s Encyclopedia has an extensive list of American Heritage series dictionaries available being: English Language (4th edition), Student, Children’s, Spanish to English, English to Spanish, Children’s Thesaurus; and with Roget’s II New Thesaurus.
As long as you can spell the first few letters of the word correctly, most of the ion database dictionaries will list the words that match the first few letters the spelled word.
Correct spelling will yield greater results, decrease the amount of time it takes to find relevant content, and when applicable variant word endings or spellings with British or Australian English published sources need to be considered as well.
Variant spelling search usage for most gale and other databases we have are:
- ( * ) for variant endings in any combination such as “fragment*” being fragment,
fragments, fragmentations.
- ( ? ) for spellings of one letter being different such as defense being defense
or defence by using a question mark. The example is “defen?e”.
- ( ! ) for ending a word variant with just one word such as “stop!” being stop or
stops and not stopped or stopping.
With Google.com, you can also confirm a spelling by the word “dictionary” then colon followed by word to confirm for example, “dictionary: heredity”. The specific sources that make up the spelling checker are not listed and may lack the exactness of say a Merriam Webster’s Dictionary. The search engine may also prompt for a "Did you mean: Waterfall" when incorrectly spelling "waterfall". For many words, this feature works well, but do use caution with the Google.com dictionary feature as not all words, terms, or spellings are accurate as websites spell words incorrectly.
Bottom line, you may find what you need faster by utilizing many of the in database dictionaries when spelling of a word is uncertain or by trying nation specific English spellings.
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