Humanities Core: General Reference and Context Sources

This dictionary is regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It provides the meaning, history, and pronunciation of hundreds of thousands of words, past and present, from across the English-speaking world. It traces words through quotations, classic literature, specialist periodicals, film scripts, and cookery books.

A multidisciplinary reference database that searches across Oxford's Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias. In addition to topic or subject searching, it offers timeline searching.

A series of guides offering introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods. The Companion guides focus on the disciplines of literature and classics, philosophy, religion, and culture, and music.

Good place for biographies of authors or introductions to literary works. Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline.

Oxford Art Online is an online reference resource for art and art history. It includes articles that span ancient to contemporary art and architecture including topical overviews and detailed artist biographies with bibliographies for further research. It also includes some images and artist signatures. Oxford Art Online combines Grove Art Online (scholarly art encyclopedia), and the Benezit Dictionary of Artists (artist biographies).

Scholarly music encyclopedia that includes the essential New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Use this to find factual information about composers, performers, genres, geographic-specific music, instruments, etc. Equally important are the lengthy bibliographies on each topic and the composer works listings, which are the standard index to find pieces in the collected works of each composer.