Pedagogical
Lexicography:
An Introduction
Prof. TIAN Bing
Shaanxi Normal
University
I. overvie w & history

An Introduction
IV. Methods and Testing

Traditional Thoughts of Education

Research M ethods

Foreign Language Education

Language Testing.

(Pedagogical) Lexicography
V. Learning
II. Lg Description

Language Descriptions

Language Corpora.

Stylistics.

Discourse Analysis. vs CA

Second Language Learning.

Individual Differences in Second
Language Learning.

Social Influences on Language
Learning.
VI. Teaching
III. Cognitive & Social

Fashions in Language Teaching

Language Acquisition: L1 vs L2

Language, Thought, and Culture.

Language and Gender.

Language and Politics.

Language Teacher Education.

World Englishes.

The Practice of LSP

Bilingual Education.
M ethodology.

Computer Assisted Language
Learning
Fig. 0 A Bird’s-Eye-Vie w of Applied Linguistic Studies
0. Introduction
1. Introduction: What is a dictionary?
 2. A Brief History of Dictionaries
 3. The Birth of English Pedagogical
Dictionaries
 4. The Development of English ALDs

5. The Family of Pedagogical Dictionaries
 6. Pedagogical Lexicographical Studies
 7. English pedagogical lexicography in
China
 8. Prospects

1. Introduction: What is a
dictionary?

Lexicography is, simply speaking, about the
principles and practice of dictionary making.
English pedagogical lexicography is then
about the making of dictionaries for teaching
and learning English, especially as a second
or foreign language.

What then is a dictionary? Ambrose Bierce
has jokingly defined “dictionary” in his The
Devil’s Dictionary as “a malevolent literary
device for cramping the growth of a
language and making it hard and inelastic,”
analogous to Dr Johnson’s definition of
dictionary makers as “harmless drudges”.

To explain or define the meaning of word is
at the heart of dictionary making. To define
a common word like “dictionary” is not an
easy task as one may imagine. For it is
usually the case that the commoner a word
is, the harder it will be to work out an
appropriate definition for it.


As a language learner or teacher, we are often
entangled in a similar situation: to figure out the
meaning of a word from a particular context or to
explain the meaning of a word to a particular
group of learners.
Sometimes we are confident in giving a
satisfactory explanation or definition and
sometimes we might not be so sure about our onsite “interpretations”. We are likely to turn to a
dictionary – to see how words are “authoritatively”
explained and defined by a professional, i.e. a
lexicographer.

Let us now turn to dictionary to see how
“dictionary” is defined. Let us consult a
learners’ dictionary first. In Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English
(henceforth LDOCE in short) (4th edition,
2003), a dictionary for advanced learners of
English as a second or foreign language,
there are two senses given, i.e. two distinct
meanings are identified and explicated:
1 a book that gives a list of words in
alphabetical order and explains their
meanings in the same language, or another
language
 2 a book that explains the words and
phrases used in a particular subject


Sometimes we might be curious about whether
different dictionaries would provide the same
explanations for the same word or even question
the “authoritativeness” of the dictionary consulted
and would like to have a check in some other
dictionaries. Let’s have a look-up in Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (henceforth OALD
in short) (7th edition, 2005), another wellestablished dictionary for advanced learners of
English. It has identified three senses for
“dictionary”:
1 a book that gives a list of the words of a
language in alphabetical order and explains
what they mean, or gives a word for them in
a foreign language
 2 a book that explains the words that are
used in a particular subject
 3 a list of words in electronic form, for
example stored in a computer’s spellchecker


If we consult a dictionary made for native
speakers of the English language, what will
the definitions be like? Let us turn to
Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate
Dictionary (2003):




1 a reference source in print or electronic form containing
words usually alphabetically arranged along with
information about their forms, pronunciations, functions,
etymologies, meanings, and syntactical and idiomatic uses
2 a reference book listing alphabetically terms or names
important to a particular subject or activity along with
discussion of their meanings and applications
3 a reference book giving for words of one language
equivalents in another
4 a computerized list (as of items of data or words) used for
reference (as for information retrieval or word processing)

Then how does the Oxford English
Dictionary (henceforth OED in short), the
most authoritative dictionary of the English
language, defines dictionary?

a book dealing with the individual words of a
language (or certain specified classes of them), so
as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation,
signification, and use, their synonyms, derivation,
and history, or at least some of these facts: for
convenience of reference, the words are arranged
in some stated order, now, in most languages,
alphabetical; and in larger dictionaries the
information given is illustrated by quotations from
literature; a word-book, vocabulary, or lexicon.

Then, how is “dictionary” defined in a
specialized dictionary for lexicographers
themselves? In Dictionary of Lexicography
(Hartmann & James 1998), it is defined as:


The most common type of reference work, first used as a title in the
Latin-English Dictionary of Syr Thomas Elyot knyght (London, 1538),
and the monolingual English Dictionaries: or, An Interpreter of Hard
English Words by Henry Cockeram (London, 1623).
Since the sixteenth century the title dictionary has been used for an
increasingly wider range of alphabetic (but also thematic), general (but
also specialised), monolingual (but also bilingual and multilingual)
reference works, from the polyglot to the historical and the pedagogical
dictionary. At the same time there has been a tendency for other terms
to be used as designations for more specialised dictionary genres, e.g.
thesaurus, encyclopedia and terminology. To describe and evaluate
the structural components of dictionaries, terms like macrostructure
(the overall word-list and its organisation) and microstructure (the
information categories presented inside the entries) have been
developed in the literature.

Let us conclude our discussion of “dictionary”
with a more recent lexicographical definition
by Sterkenburg (2004: 8).

The prototypical dictionary has the form of a static (book)
or dynamic product (e-dictionary) with an interstructure that
established links between the various components (edictionary) and is usually still alphabetically structured
(book). It is a reference work and aims to record the
lexicon of a language, in order to provide the user with an
instrument with which he can quickly find the information
he needs to produce and understand his native language.
It also serves as a guardian of the purity of the language,
of language standards and of moral and ideological values
because it makes choices, for instance in the words that
are to be described. With regard to content it mainly
provides information on spelling, form, meaning, usage of
words and fixed collocations.

From the above definitions of “dictionary” in
different types of dictionaries and in
lexicographical researches, we have got some
ideas about dictionary, dictionary making, and
dictionary researches. In what follows we will
briefly review how this branch of knowledge,
especially pedagogical lexicography, has evolved
and developed, what the status quo is nowadays,
and what the prospects are for such an endeavor
to move forwards in the future.
2. A Brief History of Dictionaries
In this part, we will say a few words
about Chinese lexicography and then go
to the lexicography in English.
 2.1 Dictionaries in Ancient China
 2.2 Dictionaries in Britain and America

2.1 Dictionaries in Ancient China

Dictionary making in China has a long history. It can be traced back at
least to Erya (or The Ready Guide) (?235 B. C. – ?213 B. C.). Erya is a
thematic dictionary in which the Chinese characters are grouped
according to the meanings they designate. It is a collection of classified
characters with their meanings collectively explained, helping to study
and correctly interpret the texts of classic works in pre-Qin Dynasties.
In this sense, it is also a “learners’ dictionary”. Two centuries later,
another monumental dictionary came – Fangyan (or The Dictionary of
Dialectal Words), compiled by Yang Xiong (53 B.C. – 18 A.D.). It is the
first dialect dictionary in China and probably also the first one in the
world as well. Another century later, Shuowen Jiezi (or An Explanatory
Dictionary of Chinese Characters) (henceforth EDCC in short) was
born.

The EDCC was compiled by Xu Shen (?38 - 121 A. D.), “the sage of
Chinese characters”. Xu Shen himself developed a “Six Category
Theory” to explain the relationships between the meaning and the form
and structure of the Chinese characters, their evolution, and their
classification, which greatly helped him to design a well-grounded
macrostructure for his EDCC. The Dictionary includes 9 353 headcharacters of zhuan style (in addition to 1 163 variants) that are
arranged according to what radical sections the key components of a
character belong to. There are altogether 540 radical sections
classified, which are “semantically related on the basis of the form and
structure of the characters” and are arranged from the simplest one to
the most complex one. Such a macrostructure has guaranteed a very
efficient retrieval system for Chinese character dictionaries. This
retrieval system has been entirely adopted by later dictionaries, still
well-manifested in The Imperial Dictionary of Kangxi (1716).
China has a glorious history of lexicography
and has produced a great number of
dictionaries, or “character-books” as dubbed
by traditional Chinese scholars.
 The English lexicography, however, has a
relatively short history.

2.2 Dictionaries in Britain and
America

English lexicography can be traced back only to a few
hundred years. “The earliest word reference books for
English-speaking people were bilingual glossaries that
provided English equivalents for Latin or French words”
(Landau 2001: 45). The practice of glossary making could
be traced back to the eighth century, but the earliest one
that could be recognized as a dictionary is Sir Thomas
Elyot’s Latin-English work of 1538 (see again the above
definition of dictionary by Hartmann & James (1998)). A
Table Alphabeticall … (Robert Cawdrey: 1604) is generally
regarded as the first monolingual philological English
dictionary.


The early history of English lexicography is depicted as follows by
Landau (2001: 46-47):
The history of lexicography includes no breathtaking innovations or
bursts of creativity that leave us in awe, as do some discoveries in the
sciences and some masterpieces of art. It is rather a succession of
slow and uneven advances in vocabulary and methodology, tempered
always in its early stages by outrageous promotional blather consisting
in equal parts of self-deification and attacks on the very predecessors
whose works one has systematically rifled and without which one’s
own dictionary would have been impossible. The first English dictionary
occurred almost inevitably as a modification of bilingual dictionaries,
some of them of far greater importance.

Cawdrey’s dictionary (1604) has only three
thousand entries, mainly a product of “successful
act of piracy”, which was popular and accepted in
the early history of English lexicography (Landau
2001: 43). Such a situation, as we can see, is
quite different from the early lexicography in China
– the early Chinese dictionaries, compiled one and
a half millennia earlier, are all works of decades of
creative and laborious endeavors.

Modern English lexicography began two and a half centuries ago with
Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in
1755. It was written in an effort “to codify the language, to establish a
standard of English, and to stigmatize and marginalize the vulgar, the
regional, the oral, and the dialect” (Lynch & McDermott 2005: 1-2). As
to the contribution to lexicography, Johnson has been highly praised for
his definitions, especially “his careful distinction and classification of
different senses of words”, and “his industriously collected illustrative
quotations” (Sledd & Kolb 1955: 2). It is one of the most famous books
in the English language and a milestone in the history of language and
lexicography. It has been seen as a culmination of an earlier tradition of
English lexicography and as a precursor of the OED (1884-1928).

The OED was compiled with Sir James A. H. Murray as its editor-inchief. Similar to Johnson’s Dictionary, it is also a dictionary of the
written English language because the written word is the only available
linguistic material before 1900. The OED is an unabridged dictionary,
aiming at including “all the words that have ever appeared in the
English language subsequent to 1150” (Stockwell & Minkova 2001:
179). Though Johnson was the first to provide citations to defend and
illustrate his definitions, “it was Murray who made a science of it,
insisting that every nuance of every word be justified by citations from
published and dated sources. He carefully sorted his citation slips and
arranged them in historical order by senses, so that one can see for
every word what the date of the earliest occurrence was and what the
earliest sense was and how, step by step, the meaning changed or
new meanings arose from older ones.” (ibid: 2001: 181).

The OED is highly original in that it is completely based on
the citation file it has collected. The citation file of the OED
had already exceeded five million when the first part of it
was published by the Oxford University Press in 1884. It
contains 240 000 entries in the 1st edition and their usages
are traced and explored through 1.8 million quotations. In
the 2nd edition (1989), about 50 500 new entries are
added. In the 3rd edition (2007), the number of entries has
increased to over 500 000 and their “usages are traced
and explored through 2.5 million quotations from a wide
range of international English language sources, from
classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts
and cookery books” (from the website of the OUP).

In the United States, a counterpart of the OED is Webster’s Third New
International Dictionary of the English Language (henceforth NID3 in
short). It was published by the Merriam-Webster Company in 1961. Its
precursors are the NID1 in 1909, containing 350 000 entries, and the
NID2 in 1934, containing 600 000 entries, the largest lexicon in English.
While the OED is compiled on historical principles, i.e. to record the
history of the English language, the NID3 is, however, a synchronic
one, aiming to describe how the English language is used “today”. It
has 450 000 entries, largely technical words. It is synchronic in that the
senses of a word are arranged with the commonest one set in the front
and less frequently used ones put next. And the etymology is treated at
the end of the entry rather than in the front.

The history of modern pedagogical
lexicography is very short, less than a
century.
3. The Birth of English
Pedagogical Dictionaries

The first group of English pedagogical dictionaries came
out chiefly in 1930s (See table 1). The years between the
two world wars were a period in which the English
language as an international language, sent around the
globe by the British Empire in the nineteenth century, was
consolidated and further promoted by the USA as new
superpower. The English language teaching (ELT in short),
especially as a foreign or second language, witnessed a
booming. The ELT and the relevant pedagogical
researches were propped up both officially or by private
foundations.

For instance the British Council was founded in 1934 “to
consider a scheme for furthering the teaching of English
abroad and to promote thereby a wider knowledge and
understanding of British culture generally” and the
government grant increased from ￡6 000 in 1935 to ￡386
000 in 1939 (Phillipson 1992: 138; Nicolson 1955: 7). The
General Service List ( West 1936), the most authoritative
and best-known of all English wordlists, was also made in
this period, supported by the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, which was established in 1910 to
“finance academic exchanges between the USA and
abroad and support the teaching of English” (Phillipson
1992: 137; Cowie 1999: 22-23; Ninkovitch 1981: 12).

The booming of ELT fostered the birth and
development of English pedagogical
dictionaries in the 1930s.
Table 1: The earliest English pedagogical dictionaries
Dictionary/time Author/ Coverage Features / styles Target audiences
country
The New
West &
Controlled
intermediate
Method English
23 898
Endicott
defining
learners:
Dictionary
India
vocabulary
comprehension
1935
A Grammar of
Describing the
ESL/EFL
English Words
Palmer
1 000
grammatical
learners:
1938
Japan
features of
production
individual words
General Basic
English
Dictionary
1940
A Beginners’
English –
Japanese
Dictionary.
1940
Idiomatic and
Syntactic
English
Dictionary
1942
Ogden
England
Hornby &
Ishikawa
Japan
20 000
2 000
Defining with 850
core words
ESL/EFL learners
& native
beginners
Ostensive
definition, learning
word meaning in
context, using
simple English to
explain
Japanese
beginners: a
bilingual
dictionary:
Detailed analysis
Hornby,
and notation:
Gatenby,
Not
commonly
used
Wakefield mentioned
words and relevant
Japan
problems
advanced
learners:
comprehension
and production

More specifically, the major academic
resources from the ELT researches for
English pedagogical dictionary making are
the vocabulary control movement, the
pedagogical grammar researches, and the
phraseology studies (Cowei 1999; 张利伟
1996).

As a result of the vocabulary control
movement, there developed quite a few
well-known wordlists. These wordlists were
obtained either objectively, such as The
Teacher’s Word Book by Edward L.
Thorndike in 1921, or subjectively, such as
Thousand-Word English by Palmer and
Hornby in 1937. The major wordlists are as
follows:
Table 2: The major wordlists made in the 1930s
Wordlist/ time
Authors/ country
Coverage
Basic English
C. K. Ogden
850
Core Words, 1920s
Britain
The Teacher’s Word
E. L. Thorndike
10 000
Book, 1921
the USA
Defining
M. P. West
1 490
Vocabulary, 1935
India
General Service
M. P. West
Not mentioned
List, 1936
India
Thousand-Word
H. E. Palmer & A.
English, 1937
S. Hornby
1 000
Japan

As to the researches into pedagogical grammar,
Palmer’s work is pioneering. He became aware of
the vital importance of structural words in the
learning of English and he systematically studied
the commonly used function words and the
sentence construction patterns, which later
developed into A Grammar of English Words
(1938). Another outstanding work was conducted
by A. S. Hornby in designing a verb-pattern
scheme, which later incorporated with the
Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (1942).

Another major difficulty fully appreciated by
Palmer and Hornby in teaching and learning
English is about the collocations and idiomatic
expressions. A large-scale analysis of phraseology
was carried out by them and the result was
published in 1933 as the Second Interim Report
on English Collocations. The report includes 3 879
collocations in 1933 and enlarged to 5 749 in 1934.
These collocations were later integrated into the
Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary (1942).

Pedagogical lexicography, from its early stage, is
closely related to the practice of English teaching
and researching. How good a pedagogical English
dictionary is, to a large extent, is determined by
how well the compilers have appreciated the
difficulties the learners have in learning English,
how well they have understood the English
language itself, i.e. its lexicon, its phonology, its
syntax, its semantics and its pragmatics, and how
well they can put the variety of information into a
dictionary in a more appropriate way.
4. The Development of English
ALDs
4.1 English ALDs in the 20th century
 4.2 English ALDs at the beginning of the
21st century


In what follows we will take English ALDs as
an example to illustrate how the English
pedagogical dictionaries have developed (as
shown in Table 3).
Table 3: A chronological list of English ALDs (Tian 2007)
2006:
2005：OALD7
2003:
2002:
2001:
COBUILD5
LDOCE4
2000: OALD6
1995: OALD5 LDOCE3
1989: OALD4
1987:
LDOCE2
1978:
LDOCE1
1974: OALD3
1963: OALD2
1948: OALD1
(1942：ISDE*)
*
COBUILD4
COBUILD3
COBUILD2
COBUILD1
ISDE：the predecessor of OALD1
CALD2
CALD1
MEDAL1
RHWAED 1
CIDE1







From Table 3 we can see that the English ALD, after its birth, has
made major progress in the past three decades, among which five new
English ALDs have been developed. Now there are six big English
ALDs available, namely:
OALD: Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary;
LDOCE: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English;
COBUILD: Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary1;
CALD(CIDE): Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary2;
RHWAED: Random House Webster’s Advanced English Dictionary.
MEDAL: Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners;
4.1 English ALDs in the 20th
century

For the three decades after its birth, OALD
had not met a serious challenge until
LDOCE came into the arena in 1978.

LDOCE (1978) was a huge success either in the world of
lexicography or in the dictionary market. Its success lies in
its timely integration of the achievements of linguistic
studies into the dictionary. For instance, its grammatical
codes and labels are based on a relatively more modern
grammatical system, i.e. A Grammar of Contemporary
English (Quirk, et al. 1972) and its illustrative example
sentences are extracted mainly from the Survey of English
Usage (SEU). To reduce the difficulty in using the
dictionary, its defining vocabulary is limited strictly to 2 000
most commonly used words. It is more friendly to the users
than OALD which still had a defining vocabulary of 3 500
words in its fourth edition in 1995.

COBUILD (1987), the third ALD, ushered in a technological revolution
in dictionary making. It was made on the basis of a computerized
corpus of 20 million words. Statistical linguistic information about word
use is obtained and used in describing the behavior of individual words.
For instance, word frequency is used for word selection and sense
frequency is used in sense selection and sense arrangement of
polysemous words. The dictionary has also abandoned the traditional
practice of writing example sentences by the lexicographers
themselves and adopted a new policy – to use only the authentic
sentences extracted from the corpus. Moreover, it has also initiated a
new mode of sense definition – sentence definition, i.e. to use
complete sentences in defining a sense. The headwords, for the first
time, are ranked into five levels according to their frequency in use.

CIDE (1995), another English ALD, joined in
the competition. It is featured in “one sense,
one entry”. In other words, the different
senses of polysemous words are treated as
individual monosemous words. In the same
year, the other three ALDs also marketed
their new editions. There were four new
dictionaries, i.e. “big four” in the same year.
Their basic features are shown in Table 4.
Table 4: Basic features of the Big Four in 1995
Dictionary
OALD5
LDOCE3
COBUILD2
CIDE1
Entries
Defining style
Defining
vocabulary
Example
sentences
63, 000
Traditional
3, 500
90, 000
16 language notes;
8 page maps;
8
page
cultural
information;
80, 000
(phrases
included)
Traditional
2, 000
Not given
Speech information;
Frequency;
information;
Sign post;
75, 000
Sentence
definition
2, 500
100, 000
Frequency
information;
Grammatical
information column
100, 000
(phrases
included)
Traditional;
partly sentence
definition
2, 000
100, 000
Guided words;
Phrase index
Coverage of varieties
Partly sentence
definition
Note: adapted from Allen (1996).
Features

Let us have a look at one aspect of the
microstructure of the big four – how the
different senses of a polylsemous word are
organized in an entry (surely, the problem of
distinguishing polysemy and homonymy is
also involved here). Let’s take bank as an
example.
OALD5:
bank1 n. river edge;
bank2 v. turn with one side higher;
bank3 n. financial institution;
bank4 v. save money;
bank5 n. piled objects.
LDOCE3:
bank1 n. 1. financial institution; 2. river edge…
bank2 v. 1. save money; 2. turn with one side higher…
CIDE1:
bank1 n. financial institution; v. save money (as a subentry)
bank2 n. raised ground (including river edge);
bank3 v. turn with one side higher;
COBUILD3:
bank1 1.n. bank as an institution; 2.n. bank as a building;
3. v. save money…6. n. the store of something
bank2 1. n. river edge; 2. n. raised ground
bank3 v. turn with one side higher

Let us have a look at one aspect of the
microstructure of the big four – how the
different senses of a polylsemous word are
organized in an entry (surely, the problem of
distinguishing polysemy and homonymy is
also involved here). Let’s take bank as an
example.



What are the policies that each dictionary has adopted in
guiding their lexicographers in arranging the different
senses of a polysemous word?
In OALD5, which has been taking a more conservative
policy, the different senses are dealt with respectively in
five entries, for it still takes the different banks as different
words.
In LDOCE3, there are only two entries, where the different
senses are classified according to a grammatical criterion,
i.e., grammatical features having taken the priority. All the
nominal senses are put under bank1 and all the verbal
senses under bank2, regardless of how close the semantic
relations are among these senses.


In CIDE, the semantic features have taken the
priority. So the “financial institution” sense and the
“save money” sense are placed under one entry
although they are in different parts of speech.
In COBUILD2, neither grammatical nor semantic
features take the priority but frequency. So in
bank1 the different senses related are arranged in
the order of frequency regardless of the semantic
or grammatical relations the senses have.
4.2 English ALDs at the beginning
of the 21st century


The new millennium arrives with two new English ALDs.
The first new dictionary is Random House Webster’s
Advanced English Dictionary (RHWAED 2001). It is the
first dictionary published in America, labeled as “advanced”.
Compared with its British counterparts, it is apparently
“lagged behind”. It is only half the size of OALD7 or
LDOCE4 and the linguistic information and illustrative
examples are relatively inadequate. Its policy for sense
arrangement is very conservative – similar to COBUILD but
with the nominal and verbal senses separately listed.
RHWAED:
bank1 n. 1. a long pile or heap;
2. a slope; incline;
3. a slope of land that borders a stream, river, or lake;
– v. 4. to border with or like a bank;
5. to pile up or form into a bank…
bank2 n. 1. financial institution;
2. a small container for holding money…
– v. 5. to save money in a bank
6. bank on or upon: to count on
bank3 n. 1. a group of objects in a line or row.
2. …

The second new dictionary is Macmillan
English Dictionary for Advanced Learners
(MEDAL 2002). It is published in Britain. It is
innovative in sense arrangement.
MEDAL:
bank1 n. 1. a financial institution;
1a. an office of a bank;
1b. [only before noun] belonging to or connected with a bank;
2. a raised area of land along the side of a river:
2a. a long area of land with sloping slides;
2b. a long pile of earth snow, or sand;
3…
3a… 3b….
bank2 v. 1. to have a bank account with a particular bank:
1a. to pay money into a bank account;
1b. to earn a particular amount of money;
2. if a plane banks, it turns quickly in the air,
with one wing higher than the other

MEDAL is similar to LDOCE in having two entries:
one for nominal senses and one for verbal senses.
It has adopted a bi-level hierarchical mode of
sense arrangement within each entry. The first
level is numerically numbered as 1, 2, 3…; and the
second subordinate level is labeled with a number
plus a letter: 1a, 1b, 1c… 2a, 2b, 2c…. Such a
mode is designed to better capture the derivative
semantic relationships between the senses of
polysemous words.

The basic features of the big six ALDs are
summarized in Table 5.
Table 5: Basic features of the Big Six English ALDs in 21st Century
Dictionary
Defining style
OALD7
2005
Coverage
/ Size
183 500
（phrs + defs）
1 905 ps
LDOCE4
2003
106 000
（+phrases）
1 906 ps
Phr definition
partial
sentence def
Not given
1 695 pages
Sentence
definition
170 000
（+ phrs）
1 610 ps
Phr definition
partial
sentence def
80 000
（+ phrs）
870 ps
Phrase
definition
100 000
（30 000 phrs+
collos）
1 658 ps
Phr definition;
partial
sentence def
COBUILD5
2006
CALD2
/CIDE3
2005
RHWAED
2001
MEDAL
2002
Phr
definition
Defining
vocab
Example
sentences
3 000
85 000
2 000
75 000
2 500
75 000
Special features
16 ps lg studies; 8 ps color atlas; 8 ps color illus;
Usage note index; Short cuts for senses
Whole dic colorful; 16 ps lg notes;
4 color atlas; colloquial info; frequency info;
sense signpost
Frequency info;
grammatical, pragmatic info labels
2 000
100 000
Phr index; variety coverage;
false friends for 16 languages;
sense guiding words
Not given
45 000
American idioms;
synonym discriminations;
usage notes
2 500
Not given
22 language pages; 16 pages of color illus;
frequency info; rich columns (collos, meaning
extensions, discriminations, metaphors, cultural
ones); quick sense menus
Note: collo : colloquial ; def : definition ; dic : dictionary ; freq : frequency ; illus : illustration ; info: information;
lg : language ; p : page ; phr: phrase