What is the Cobuild Dictionary?

What is the Cobuild Dictionary? Its full title is the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, and it is a dictionary that defines words in the English language and describes how they are actually used by English speakers. To discover how words are used, the editorial team for the dictionary works with a corpus of English, an electronic database holding more than 300 million words in pieces of text. By collecting texts of written and spoken English from a variety of different sources, the project has preserved the context - the way that each word has been used. The corpus is called the Bank of English and it continues to grow.

Take time as an example of the way the Cobuild English Dictionary presents a word: the entry for time takes up about two and a half pages of the dictionary, describing 74 different uses of the word. As one would expect, it begins with a basic definition and gives some real examples taken from the corpus, then it moves on through common expressions such as "the times," "behind the times," and "the best of times." A real text example taken from the corpus is provided for each entry, and notes in the margins provide additional information, such as whether the word is being used as a noun or an adjective etc., the frequency with which it appears in English use and other useful information. While other English language dictionaries deal with words in a similar way, they are generally not as comprehensive as the Cobuild Dictionary, and they typically don't provide real examples.

The Cobuild is often referred to as the Cobuild Learner's Dictionary, and this is where its major strength lies: because the focus of the book is the way in which words are actually used by English speakers, rather than the way they are defined in formal rules of English grammar, the Cobuild English Dictionary is an invaluable tool for those who are learning English as a second language. What is the Cobuild Dictionary for a learner of English? It is a user's guide to pragmatics - how to make yourself clearly understood and how to get the results you want with carefully chosen words.

For those who learned English as their mother tongue, and therefore handle problems of pragmatics intuitively and rather effortlessly in most instances, the Cobuild English Dictionary is still a useful tool. It is an excellent reference for clarifying an encounter with a familiar word being used in an unfamiliar way. For example, it will tell you that a "speech bubble" is the balloon shape that contains speech text in comic strips. For writers, the Cobuild helps with choosing wording in tricky passages. A writer might ask, "Can I use this word or expression in this context?," or "is this an outdated word or a word used only by a few people?: how often is this word used in English today?" The Cobuild Learner's Dictionary will likely have the answer. The dictionary is also a valuable reference for English teachers.

The first edition of the Cobuild Dictionary was published in 1987. the corpus at that time held 20 million words in texts collected in the 1980s. A newer edition, based on texts collected in the 1990s came out in 1995 and has been reprinted a number of times:

Sinclair, John, ed. in chief. Collins Cobuild English Dictionary. London: Harper Collins, 1999

ISBN 0 00 370941 8 (paperback), 0 00 375029 9 (hard cover) - check for newer editions.

Rosemary Drisdelle is a freelance writer with a particular interest in science and health writing for a general audience. She is the author of "Birds" for Suite101.com, and is available for writing projects on a contract basis. Contact Attica Freelance Writers.

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