'Anybody know how many r's there are in 'embarrassment?'' 'What's another word for 'meeting?'' 'How many acres are there in a square mile?'

Those are the kinds of questions you're likely to hear panicked reporters blurting out in the frenzied atmosphere of a newsroom on deadline. And invariably they'll find that all the newsroom dictionaries and almanacs have mysteriously disappeared and their colleagues are even more fact-impaired than they are.

You can be spared from the resulting bloopers on the evening broadcast or in the morning paper by using the Internet to quickly get answers to simple spelling and factual questions.

Scattered through the Web is an immense collection of reference materials -- from dictionaries and encyclopedias to calculators and conversion tools. In this column I'll describe some of the better resources commonly used by reporters so you can bookmark them in your browser for quick reference in the future. I'll also note some indexes that will help you locate more specialized tools.

  Dictionaries

When you need to check the spelling or definition of a word, you can tap the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary at the company's Web site. Just type in a word and the search engine will look it up for you. If you're uncertain of the spelling, type a '?' in place of the letter you're unsure of or use an '*' as a wildcard to replace multiple letters in a word.

For an even more comprehensive dictionary search, you can use the OneLook Dictionaries Web site. OneLook will simultaneously search 450 different online dictionaries that have more than 2 million words in their electronic databases. It too supports wildcard letter searches.

For a list of more specialized dictionaries -- such as for medical or legal terms -- try the Encyberpedia Web site. Click on 'glossaries' to see the list of online dictionaries.

  Encyclopedias

For more detailed information than a dictionary provides, you can turn to a number of searchable encyclopedias on the Web.

Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia is online at http://www.funkandwagnalls.com.

You'll have to register, but it's free.

Encyclopedia.com makes available a searchable version of the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, which has 17,000 topical articles in its database.

There are scores of other encyclopedias online that cover particular subject areas. A good listing of those is at the Virtual Reference Sites Web page.

  Almanacs

To quickly look up commonly cited facts, you can access the Information Please Almanac at http://www.infoplease.com.

Type a word in the search box and it will search not only the almanac, but also an online dictionary and encyclopedia.

  Biographical Dictionaries

Looking for background on a famous person? The Biographical Dictionary is online at http://www.s9.com/biography/search.html with entries for 25,000 notable people.

Type a name into the search box using the format first-name last-name, or just type in a last name. You also can search by a keyword that defines a person's profession (musician, president, etc.), or for a particular year to find out who was born or died then.

A similar database provided by Biography.com has more than 20,000 biographies culled from the Cambridge Encyclopedia, the Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography and other sources.

Or you can use the Britannica's Lives service to find out what famous people were born on a particular day of the year.

  Thesauri

The old mainstay for finding synonyms -- Roget's Thesaurus -- is online at several sites, including the University of Chicago's ARTFL Project.

Merriam-Webster has its thesaurus on the Web as well at http://www.m-w.com/thesaurus.htm.

  Acronyms

Not sure if the DEA is the Drug Enforcement Administration or Agency? Look up the acronym at the University College Cork Web page at http://www.ucc.ie/cgi-bin/acronym.

  Famous Quotations

Columbia University has put online the 1901 edition of the classic Bartlett's Familiar Quotations at http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett.

Type a word in the search box to locate a quotation (or search for a phrase by enclosing it in quotations).

  Grammar and Usage

Having trouble with who, whom, which and that? The Elements of Style, William Strunk's famous guide to English writing and usage, is available online at the Columbia University Web site at http://www.cc.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/strunk/.

This is the original 1918 edition of Strunk's handy little book, which was later revised by E.B. White.

For basic rules of grammar, you also can refer to the On-line English Grammar site sponsored by the Digital Education Network.

Sorry, the AP Stylebook is not available online. But you can get information on ordering it at the AP Web page at http://www.ap.org/pages/order.html.

  Language Translators

Need to translate a word from Spanish to English? Several sites provide foreign language dictionaries that you can use to help translate words. Robert Beard's A Web of Online Dictionaries has cataloged dictionaries that translate words in more than 20 languages into their English equivalents, as well as another 20 English-to-another-language translators.

Just pick the type of translation you want from the drop-down menu, type your word in the large search box, select 'Text' and click on 'Translate.'

  Currency Converters

Need to change a number from francs to dollars? At Xenon Laboratories' Universal Currency Converter you just type in the amount of money and use the drop-down menus to choose the types of currency you want to convert.

About 90 different world currencies are available at the main page. Or you can select the highlighted entry for 'Full Universal Currency Converter' to access the complete database of 180 currencies. If you need to know what a currency was worth at some past date, try the Classic 164 Currency Converter, which has daily exchange rates back to January 1, 1980 for 164 different currencies.

And the Columbia Journalism Review Web page has an inflation calculator, which you can use to convert dollars from a previous year into their current, inflation-adjusted values. The inflation tool is at http://www.cjr.org/resources/inflater.asp.

  Calculators

Feet to meters, acres to square miles, days to seconds, Celsius to Fahrenheit -- you can instantly do all those conversions and thousands of more combinations at Unit's on the Web.

Use the drop-down menus to pick a general category -- like length, area, time or temperature -- and to select what you want to convert to and from. Then type in a number and the program will instantly do the calculation for you. For other more specialized calculators on the Internet, go to 'Martindale's 'The Reference Desk,'' which catalogs 8,000 of them. That's at http://www-sci.lib.uci.edu/~martindale/RefCalculators.html.

The calculators are listed by general topic area. Because the list is so large, try using the 'Find' button in your browser to do a keyword search of the page for the particular type of calculator you are seeking.

  Maps and Distances

An editor often wants to know how far the scene of a natural disaster or other news event is from the city in which your paper is located -- just to give the reader a frame of reference in a story.

You can instantly calculate the distance between any two cities or towns in the United States and many foreign cities as well at a Web site appropriately named 'How far is it?'

And to help get you to an assignment, you can use the Internet to view a street map in virtually any city in the country.

Two of the most popular map services on the Web are MapQuest at (at the main page, click on the highlighted word 'Maps') and MapBlast.

At either site, you type in an address to call up a street map. You then can zoom in or zoom out on the area.

One caution -- these services also offer links to driving instructions to the address you specify. But the computer programs that generate the directions often plot incredibly convoluted ways of getting to a destination, so you probably want to figure out your own route.

For atlases and maps of the world, try the archive at the University of Texas' Perry-Casta?eda Library.

There you'll find a huge collection of electronic maps, organized by region of the world. The maps are graphic files and many of them are huge -- 300 KB is common -- so brace yourself for a lengthy download time.

  Calendars

Ever looked up an old clip that mentions an event that happened 'last Sunday?' The clip is dated but no day is listed on it. How do you find out what date that previous Sunday was?

Use earth.com to pull up an online calendar for any of the past 2,000 years. Type in a month and year or just a year, and you'll get a miniature wall calendar for that time period.

For other types of calendars available online, go to the Calendar Zone.

Many of the reference sites I've listed here can be reached from a single Web page -- the Research-It! site.

There you'll see listings for dictionaries, a thesaurus, a biographical dictionary, language translators and so on, all of which you can search directly from the Research-It page.

  I've given you only a sample of some of the most useful of the many reference materials available on the Web. For a more complete list, try the reference section of the Internet Public Library at http://www.ipl.org/ref/RR/static/ref0000.html.

And if you know of a great reference resource I missed, send me an e-mail message and I'll include it as an update to this column.