Reference Materials at NYU Libraries

The resources in this section support learning with and about language, contemporary and ancient, technical and literary, biographical and bibliographical.

Dictionaries help us understand words' meaning and conventional usage. Dictionaries also provide the etymology of terms and can be useful for establishing the emergence of a word’s forms and senses. Our collection includes dictionaries that provide equivalent words in many global languages. This guide focuses on fundamental tools but the library also has many specialized dictionaries, including names of key figures, words, definitions, and/or other information related to particular topics (e.g. marine science) or fields of study (e.g. art history).

Thesauri help us relate words to one another by providing lists of terms with similar and opposing meanings. We have included some of our most used thesauri but these too can be quite diverse; our collection includes multilingual thesauri, including Old English, and specialized resources, like this NASA thesaurus explaining relationships between terms used in aerospace engineering and physics.

Finally, on this page we have included other general language resources, ancient language databases and a language self-study program.

Strategies for finding dictionaries, thesauri, and language resources:

• Use the Advanced Search feature of the library catalog
• Set the “Any Field” dropdown menu to “Subject.” This will tell the database to search for your keyword(s) within the subject heading field of the catalog records.
• Use subject terms like dictionaries or thesauri in the plural. Additional subject terms can be added to the next search line to specify languages, themes, etc.