As some of you already know, I think it is important to choose one's words carefully, so that "one may say what one means and mean what one says." (I forget the attribution.)

As a starting point, I use regular dictionaries, and I think that referring to more than one dictionary can also be helpful to fully grasp the senses of a word.

One of my favorite dictionary sources is "OneLook.Com" at http://OneLook.Com.... This resource claims to have "12,307,007 words in 1025 dictionaries indexed."

Another one of my favorites resources is an "hierarchical" dictionary and thesaurus by "WordNet-Online.Com" at http://www.WordNet-On... This resource includes "Definitions, synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, holonyms, derived forms and sample sentences." I think this one must be experienced to appreciate its thoroughness and how helpful it can be in "reducing" an abstraction to concretes.

I have just come across a "visual" thesaurus or "think map" for words by "VisualThesaurus.Com" at http://www.VisualThes... This one also must be experienced to appreciate, although my first impression is that I will prefer the "hierarchical" one, which has more complete information.

I would be interested in learning of other such interesting dictionary resources, if anyone knows of any.