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 Welcome to
Oxford Reference Online! In Oxford Reference Online: Premium Collection you will find a wealth of facts, figures, definitions, and
translations from 175+ Oxford reference titles, many of which are in-depth, scholarly articles from titles in the acclaimed Oxford
Companions series, plus all 20,000 quotations from the Oxford Dictionary
of Quotations.
For a quick introduction to the main features of The Premium Collection, take a
look at our Tour. For more information on the books
and subjects available to you, visit our Subjects & books section.
The Premium Collection has an 'intelligent search' which will find your search term whether it appears in an entry heading, the full text of the entry, and will even find it if you have misspelled it. The Premium Collection also features improved reordering and refining options for search results to help you focus on the type of entry which best suits your needs.
Oxford Reference Online is an expanding, regularly updated resource. The Premium Collection is regularly updated. Visit our What's new section to find out more about our updating programme and what has been added recently.
We even have a fun Fact of the Day feature which you can use to test and expand your general knowledge. You can even sign up to receive Fact of the Day by email.
Search tips
The ORO team have included some quick search tips here to get you started. We've also given you links to specific sections in the Oxford Reference Online Help file, which will answer some of the more common queries about the site.
For more detailed help on searching, see Using the search tools
and Sorting and refining search results.
Search defaults
By default the search engine looks for all of your search terms in entry headings and prioritizes the closest matches to your search term at the top of the search results list. If you have used the Quick search option you can widen your search to full text by clicking on the widen search button in the top right-hand corner of the search results page.
If no results are found in entry headings, our intelligent searching facility moves on to full text to look for your search terms. Finally, if it has not found results in entry headings or full text, it uses a Pattern search to find similarly spelt words, in case you've misspelled your search term.
If, for example, you've misspelled millennium as milenium, the search engine will still find results for you.
See the following sections in the Help file for more information about this:
Search defaults
Widen search
Wildcards
You can use wildcards if you're not sure of the spelling, if there are several variant forms of the word that you are looking for, or if you want to find words which start or end in the same letter. The wildcard facility is also great for solving crossword clues!
Use an asterisk (*) in your search term for one or any number of characters. regulat* will find regulatory and regulation, for example.
Other wildcards which you can use include: the question mark (?), which matches one character (number or letter); the hash symbol (#), which matches one number; and the @ symbol, which stands for any single letter.
See our Help section on Wildcards and fuzzy search for other wildcards which are supported in Oxford Reference Online.
Do you want to find an exact phrase?
Perhaps you are looking for references to business ethics and only want entries defining this exact phrase? Just put double quotation marks around your search term.
We hope this has been a useful quick guide to using Oxford Reference Online. If you get stuck you can also refer to the detailed Help, the Frequently Asked Questions section, or Contact us with your questions.
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