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• Bains William, Biotechnology A-Z, Oxford University Press, 2003. About 400 entries/ definitions. Particularly good at explaining variant meanings and contexts. 

• Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, W. B. Saunders Co., 29^th edition, 2000. 121,160 definitions.

• FAO Glossary of Biotechnology for Food and Agriculture, Food and Agricultural Organization, 2002, 3196 terms http://www.fao.org/biotech/index_glossary.asp  Not just for food or agriculture. 

• * Google definitions Use define: word or phrase you want http://www.googleguide.com/glossary.html 

• * IUPAC Comp International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, Compendium of Chemical Terminology: Recommendations, compiled by Alan D. McNaught and Andrew Wilkinson, Blackwell Science, 1997. "Gold Book" http://www.chemsoc.org/chembytes/goldbook/ See the bibliography for other IUPAC print and web compilations.

• King, Robert C. and William D. Stansfield, Dictionary of Genetics, Oxford University Press, 1997. About 6600 definitions. 

• Lackie JM and JAT Dow, Dictionary of Cell & Molecular Biology, Academic Press, 3^rd ed., 1999  7,000+ definitions.   

• MeSH Medical Subject Headings, (PubMed Browser) National Library of Medicine, Revised annually. 250,000 entry terms, 19,000 main headings. http://www4.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/htbin-post/Entrez/meshbrowser? You can also look for terms in the titles or text words of PubMed Medline articles http://www4.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/[

• MeSH bibliography 2016  https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/intro_biblio.html Dictionaries, handbooks, textbooks, websites  As more information is published online, the range of formats used in verifying and checking MeSH definitions for currency and completeness is expanding. Online manuals of drugs and other chemicals as well as full text journals are now also relied upon in creating and maintaining the ever-expanding Medical Subject Headings vocabulary

• NHGRI (National Human Genome Research Institute), Glossary of Genetic Terms, ongoing revision. 250+ definitions. Includes extended audio definitions. https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary  

• * Onelook Dictionaries, Bob Ware http://onelook.com/index.html  An index to 700+ online dictionaries.

• *Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Oxford University Press, 2000. Over 17,000 main entries. 

• Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page can be very useful.  I particularly like the disambiguation pages and the category pages. 

* Recommended Search Engine
I use Google http://www.google.com (a lot)  more than any other search engines. Explore the Advanced Search features  http://www.google.com/advanced_search  and Search tools. 
See also  FAQ #2 for examples. . Are there others you've found helpful? 

The Glossary FAQ question #3  has information on using search engines to quantitate variant forms of a word of phrase.

Databases, free and for fee
Electronic databases are great for tracking down current use of terms and tracing how far back they’ve been used. With a very limited budget I use free PubMed http://www4.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/  for the most part. But fee based database vendors can be cost effective and quick.

Additional recommendations for background information
Lewin, Benjamin GENES https://archive.org/details/LewinGenesX 

Lodish, Harvey, Molecular Cell Biology https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21475/

Patient resources links to websites for general patient and disease related information.

This is a work in progress. I find new (at least to me) words and phrases nearly every day. Some would be familiar to a specialist. Others are newly coined. No single source I’ve found is comprehensive in this interdisciplinary area. And the web isn’t always the best place to find a clear definition.  I particularly recommend the Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, King's Dictionary of Genetics and William Bain's Biotechnology from A to Z, and frequently consult my copies.  (And the Oxford English Dictionary (Second edition and supplements) is a surprisingly fruitful source as well.) A medical dictionary can also be quite helpful.  And Onelook.com is always worth trying.

But there are a number of terms which I’d be hard-pressed to figure out without the web.