Britain's oldest publishing house, Oxford University Press, plans to launch the world's biggest general knowledge website.

The pay-to-view site, Oxford Reference Online, is scheduled to go online in March. It will contain more than 130 million word definitions, making it more than double the size of the web's present biggest reference site, OUP's 60 million word Oxford English Dictionary Online.

OUP Oxford, working in collaboration with OUP New York, will put more than 100 of its reference dictionaries and companion volumes online in a bid to make a reference database more than three times the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

OUP project director David Swarbrick said: "Oxford Reference Online is the perfect complement to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, launched 18 months ago."

He added: "Fact-finding may be its most obvious function, but its vast range of data will also take users into genuinely new areas of knowledge, allowing them to move from one piece of information to another -- from 'oil', as a commodity, to 'Oil!' as a novel, and from 'daydreaming', in French, to 'lucid dreaming', in psychology."

Annual subscriptions, initially only to institutions, will range from £175 for a school to £2,500 for a large university.

Mr Swarbrick said many institutions worldwide have renewed their subscriptions for the online dictionary, and sales of the printed version have also increased.

OUP, which has invested £1m in the project, hopes to break even within three years, and to be in profit in four.

The company will rely on the reputation of its editors to produce accurate information.

OUP's pilot site, www.oxfordreference.com, states that anything "from dictionaries of politics and physics to superstitions and saints" will be available.

The new site will bring OUP into direct competition with Xref.com's subscription reference site set up last month.