Free English learning resources
50 free resources, checked and categorised.
Every link is usable without paying. Some ask for a free account or keep extras behind a paid tier, and those are labelled.
Everything below is usable without paying; where a resource asks for a free account or keeps extras behind a paid tier, the row says so. The list covers the main ways people study English: structured courses to build a foundation, dictionaries to look things up, and listening and reading material to spend real time in the language. Start with one course and one dictionary, then add listening once you can follow simple sentences.
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Historical dictionary of words and senses that originated in or are distinctive to Canadian English.
American Political Science Association style manual, free to download.
General American dictionary with detailed etymologies and usage guidance.
Learner's dictionary, formerly Merriam-Webster's Learner's Dictionary, with usage notes and example sentences.
Core American English vocabulary defined for beginner and intermediate learners.
Core British English vocabulary defined for beginner and intermediate learners.
Monolingual dictionary written for learners, with simplified definitions and example sentences.
Defines words in full sentences rather than fragments, which shows how each word is actually used.
Words and pronunciations specific to particular regions of the United States.
Historical dictionary of South African English, with citations showing each term in use.
General English dictionary based on Random House Webster's Unabridged, with a thesaurus.
Online ESL listening practice with short audio/video conversations, organized into easy, intermediate, difficult, and academic lessons plus grammar and vocabulary activities
"I'm Tom and I make weekly videos teaching you fresh modern British English. My job is to help you fall in love with English, one video at a time, so that you can take your English to the next level. Lots of vocabulary, not much grammar. There are also accent analysis videos."
Have any questions regarding the English grammar? You can ask them here.
Learn beautiful British English for free on Youtube with English teacher Lucy Bella Earl.
Search billions of words of real English to check whether a phrase is actually used, and how often.
Charts how often words and phrases appear in books over time. Good for settling usage arguments.
Podcast and article archive on English grammar and usage, with short posts about sentence fragments, capitalization, plurals, and punctuation rules
Blog posts on English grammar, usage, etymology, and word origins, with searchable articles and occasional book and broadcast links
Historical slang dictionary tracing terms across four centuries, free to search online.
Searchable A-Z of the Guardian's house style, useful for British usage questions.
Learn English through TV series, songs, interviews, movies and animations. Includes colloquialisms and their cultural context.
Learner's dictionary that marks the most frequent words in spoken and written English.
A language learning game - choose the song and the difficulty level and fill in the blanks in lyrics while listening.
Free style guide widely used in UK humanities writing and publishing.
MLA guidance on citation and academic writing, common in humanities courses.
Standard American dictionary with audio pronunciation, word history and a thesaurus.
Transcripts of real university lectures, seminars and study groups, for academic listening and speech patterns.
Blog posts arguing against prescriptive grammar myths, using examples from English word meanings and usage to explain language change
A lot of information about American dialects, includiang a map and tables. Tons of content collected and put together by Rich Aschmann.
Shows which words naturally go together, which is the gap most learners hit after intermediate.
Searchable English dictionary and thesaurus covering millions of entries, with wildcard pattern searches, reverse lookup, and word games.
Traces where English words came from and how their meanings shifted over time.
Learner's dictionary with graded definitions, usage notes and audio for British and American pronunciation.
A Youtube channel - grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. A great guy.
Searchable reference of thousands of English phrases, idioms, sayings, and proverbs, with meanings, origins, and usage examples plus a phrase thesaurus
An Irishman's blog about the English language. A rare example of a blog listed here that is still active.
Blog posts and readings on British and American English, with short articles and usage notes you can read to compare differences and examples
Blog posts about English swearwords, slang, and word history, plus occasional audio and translation pieces like Beowulf adaptations and usage notes
Free writing style guide adapted from AP style, covering punctuation, grammar and usage.
Award-winning English-learning podcast with over 900 episodes, transcripts, and special phrasal verb and premium lessons on vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation
The Economist's own style manual as a free PDF. Opinionated, readable and a good guide to concise English.
Joseph Wright's 1898 survey of English dialect words, scanned and readable in full.
Idiom and phrase dictionary compiled from Collins, McGraw-Hill, Cambridge and other published sources.
English-language podcast episodes with transcripts tracing the history of English through language change and historical events, with each post playing or downloading an episode
Blog posts explaining and cataloguing English snowclones with examples, variants, and commentary on how each phrase is used
Crowdsourced slang dictionary. Useful for decoding current internet and spoken slang; entries are unmoderated and often crude.
Crowdsourced multilingual dictionary covering rare words, dialect terms and etymologies other dictionaries omit.
Thesaurus and word tools for your creative needs. You can search for synonyms and anthonyms here, but also for rhymes, words containing particular letters and more. Useful if you want to cheat in Scrabble.
Online English dictionary and thesaurus with definitions, example sentences, grammar tips, usage articles, and word-finder tools for games like Scrabble and Wordle
Learn it there, practise it here
Free resources are great for input: reading, listening, explanations. They are weaker at the two things that actually move you forward: speaking English out loud, and remembering what you met once. That is what OwnSlides is for.
Say it out loud
Talk to an AI tutor that answers back, or get matched with other learners and native speakers for a text chat.
Practise what you read
Turn a grammar point or article into exercises, so it moves from recognised to usable.
Keep the words
Save new words to My Words and let spaced repetition bring them back before you forget them.
This directory began from a community-built list of free language resources, a year of collecting and checking by Joanna (u/chlebka) and dozens of contributors who suggested links, shared freely. See the original list. We have since expanded, re-checked and re-categorised it, and we keep the per-resource credits where the original list recorded them.