Just so that noone will ever say “why didn’t you say so?”.

The Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal (WNT) is on line and for free.
The claim that it is the world’s largest dictionary is probably a way of interpretation (there are 400.000 entries) but I guess it is fair to say it is in the same league as the OED, although it is not that strong on etymology.

Those interested need to get a free subscription at http://wnt.inl.nl/ .
Unfortunately, the interface is not very intuitive (so it is tuitive?) and everything is in Dutch. If anybody is interested anyway, I’m willing to give directions on how it works.

Good reference, Dutchtoo, and thanks for the warning.

Nice one Dutchtoo, appreciated.

I’m signed up already, thanks for the heads-up.

Thanks, Dutchtoo, but I can’t see enough of the page to sign up.  Or am I looking at the wrong thing?

Eliza, when you go to the link, you see a page looking like the attached image, right?

Press the text “Ga direct naar het woordenboek” at the bottom.

You should now see a log-in screen. One of the available buttons is called “Inschrijven”.
Press this button. You will now be promted to enter an e-mail address (confirm with “ga verder"). After that you will see a confirmation screen, telling you that a password has been sent to your e-mail address. It may take a while (half an hour or more) before you get it (they are very busy at the moment).

Wow, a lot of it must have been written a long time ago, no?
I can see old case-endings and spellings in the lemmas that have long since gone overboard in Dutch spelling and grammar revisions of the 20th century.

Fantastic online resource though for an expat here like me.

Did you manage to get signed up, Eliza?

Eliza, when you go to the link, you see a page looking like the attached image, right?

Wrong.

I see part of the same page, but not all of it, presumably because my screen resolution is set to suit my eyes rather than the web designer’s preference.  There is also a black bar right across the bottom of my (reduced size) page, with

ONW (500-1200) ± 4.500 trefwoorden | VMNW (1200-1300) ± 26.000 trefwoorden | MNW (1250-1550) ± 75.000 trefwoorden | WNT (1500-1976) ± 450.000 trefwoorden

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to use this site.

Wrong.

Pitty. Just to make sure: you can’t scroll down? When I set my monitor to 800x600, the lower part disappears from the screen. There are no scroll bars visible, but when I click somewhere in the text and then press the down key, the page will scroll up, revealing the clickable text.

The black bar does remain visible, because it is not part of the body text of the page. It’s like some kind of banner, projected over it.

Maybe you can give it another shot?

The reason why much of the language looks a bit archaic is that they started publishing it in 1864! So it lived through a number of spelling revisions. It was finished in 1998. After that some addendums (addenda?) were published as well. The lemmas are searchable on both old and new spelling. I have been looking for an introduction article about the WNT in English, explaining all this, but couldn’t find one.

Edit: found an article on the INL website itself. Click the GTB link on the left on the introduction page. Then search on English in the ‘Zoek’ box. Select the first article that comes up. This also works if you haven’t registred.

Thanks for the help, dutchtoo. I’ve now registered and am looking forward to browsing this site.