The Library: History: Welcome

Your Academic Librarians

Penny Cole, Karen Fisher & Catherine Parkin

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Welcome to your History subject pages

As your Academic Librarians, we have created these pages to help you access quality academic resources in your subject area. We also support your studies through:

School liaison - working with your school to ensure the Library has the resources you need
Collection development - purchasing Library resources for your course
Teaching - delivering Library inductions, specialist sessions (e.g. referencing or finding information for specific assignments) and one-to-one appointments to help you develop your skills
Research support - assisting staff and research students to make the most of information sources

If you have any comments or suggestions about these pages please email us.

Discover History resources quickly and easily

Discover is your academic search engine, allowing you to quickly search for a broad range of material in your topic area. Some resources are not searchable on Discover however, so you may also want to search separately on:

Discover FAQs

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Looking for the etymology of a word?

Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world.

As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from Dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, and of the language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.

The OED started life more than 150 years ago. Today, the dictionary is in the process of its first major revision. Updates revise and extend the OED at regular intervals, each time subtly adjusting our image of the English language.