The Century Dictionary is free... (Score 2)

Having worked for the OED for ten years and developed the prototypes for the OED Online, I can confirm the sad fact that publishing companies are in no mood to give away their content and are, indeed, only reluctantly involved with the world wide web (the first suggested OED Online prototype was working and suggested in 1994, but it took them till 2000 to launch a version with reduced functionality...). Unfortunately, it is also true that it takes a lot of money and many hours of serious scholarly effort to produce a major reference work. I am happy to report, however, that I have put the entire 10 volume, 10,000 page Century Dictionary (considered by many to be the greatest American dictionary ever produced) freely online in DjVu format. For those who might be interested, the url is http://www.century-dictionary.com and it includes headword lookup and full text search capability.