Collins ELT
Are Print Primary Dictionaries Still Relevant for Young Learners?
Today’s language learning environment offers a wealth of information for all ages and levels of learner, with everything available online at the cl...
Exploring new phrasal verbs: drilling down and dialling it up (part 1)
With new phrasal verbs continuing to proliferate in the English language, we at COBUILD surveyed a variety of news and other media sources to identify the most frequent new phrasal verbs for the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs.
COBUILD: The Evolving Corpus – How corpus use has changed over the years
Size matters when it comes to corpora. At 220 million words of text, the corpus used to create the second edition of the COBUILD dictionary in 1995 was over ten times the size of the one used for the first edition, and 220 times bigger than the first electronic corpora developed in the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet it was tiny compared to those we use today, some of which amount to billions, not millions of words.
COBUILD: Shifting senses – How the meanings of words change
In the 30 years since the publication of the first COBUILD dictionary, a whole flurry of new words has come into the language and as they’ve caught on and become part of everyday usage, they’ve been added to the dictionary.
COBUILD Part 2: The Early Years – A dictionary from a corpus
By the time I arrived at COBUILD as part of the 1993 intake recruited to work on the second edition of the dictionary, the whole project had been fully computerised for several years. This meant working on screen at terminals linked to mainframe computers that hummed away in a separate room, still with the green text on a black background, as described by Andrew Delahunty in Part 1.
COBUILD: Design and Layout – Changes over the last 30 years
Where were you 30 years ago? I was in the middle of my university studies, still to embark on my ELT career, and as such, a smidgin too late to be part of the intrepid and free-spirited COBUILD dictionary team. Led by the late John Sinclair, this large young team was involved in bringing to life his vision: to create a dictionary for learners that was based on a large digital language database – or a corpus.
COBUILD Part 1: The Early Years - Where it all began
I have always counted myself as incredibly fortunate to have worked as part of the COBUILD team at the time that I did, between October 1983 and the end of 1986. I was not quite 24 when I arrived in Birmingham, not knowing one end of a dictionary definition from another. By the time I left I was pretty sure lexicography was going to be my career and, over 30 years later, I’m still doing it.