John McPhee famously considered a dictionary his secret weapon. What's your secret weapon?
If like me you're not a native speaker of English, you've probably used bilingual dictionaries to learn about English words. But at a certain level of proficiency, you almost certainly want to use a monolingual dictionary instead. You want to look up words the way a native speaker would.
Here are some of my favorites:
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Oxford English Dictioary 2nd ed (1989)
The gold standard, comprised of 20 volumes, aims to be a complete catalog of the English language, with etymology and (anceint) usage examples.
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Webster's 1913 aka Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
Connoisseur's reference to American English - a dictionary for writers and wordsmiths. McPhee loved this dictionary for a reason.
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Kenkyusha Dictionary of English Collocations
A collocation dictionary, maybe the best. Confusingly the copy I have has Chinese translation mixed in with the English collocations, but these are easy to ignore
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Roget's Thesaurus
A single volume that helps you find, not just synonyms, but also other parts of speech that are in the vicinity of the concept you're looking for. So for example, your mind may be searching for a noun but really the better choice could be a verb or adjective. Roget's Thesaurus helps you find the right word.
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The Synonym Finder (1978)
According to Kevin Lelly, The Synonym Finder is the best thesaurus there is.
Finally, if you want to learn the pronunciation of a word, I find it much more useful to hear the work actually spoken out loud in context. Use youglish to search Youtube's vast archive of talks delievered by native speakers. This includes place names like Arkansas and foreign words. Ever wondered how competent speakers pronounce akarasia? Youglish will help you satisfy your curiosity.