These are friends of words. Seek them out. If you’re intimidated by language, they will welcome you in. If you’re already a fan, these links can be your playgrounds.

TOOLS
ASL (American Sign Language) Alphabet
Describing Words Adjective Engine
Google Books Ngram Viewer
Hangul (Korean) Keyboard
Internet Anagram Server
Internet Archive
IPA  (International Phonetic Alphabet) Keyboard
Linguist List
Plain Language Writing Helper
Project Gutenberg
The Rosetta Project

SOCIETIES & CONFERENCES
ACES (American Copy Editors Society)
ADS (American Dialect Society)
ANS (American Name Society)
DSNA (Dictionary Society of North America)
ICEHL (International Conference on English Historical Linguistics)
LSA (Linguistic Society of America)
NWAV (an annual sociolinguistics conference)
SHEL (Studies in the History of the English Language)

DIGITAL REFERENCE WORKS
DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English)
Dictionary.com
Etymonline
Green’s Dictionary of Slang
Historical Thesaurus of English
OED (Oxford English Dictionary)
OneLook.com
M-W (Merriam-Webster)
Wordnik

PODCASTS
A Way With Words
The Allusionist
CliffNotes CramCasts
Fiat Lex
Great Speeches in History
Lingua Franca
Membean Word Root of the Day
NPR Sunday Puzzle
Poetry Off the Shelf
Slate Presents Lexicon Valley
Speculative Grammarian
Stephen Fry’s Podgrams
The Vocal Fries
Word Gang

FRIENDLY LANGUAGE WRITING
Anatoly Liberman (Oxford Etymologist)
Ben Zimmer
Beyond Wordplay
Dictionary Stories
Jesse Shiedlower
Jonathon Green (Mister Slang)
Language Log
Lynne Murphy (Separated by a Common Language)
Paul Anthony Jones (Haggard Hawks)
The Snowclone Database
Strong Language