Jean Aitchison
Words pour into the English language all the time. New ones pop up continually in newspapers, television, radio, and recently, the World Wide Web …

Words Pour into English - Part 2

Jean Aitchison

Words Pour into English - Part 3

Jean Aitchison

The British National Corpus

Michael Rundell
For a few weeks in 1994, British newspapers contained dozens of references to 'clear blue water'. If you assembled a corpus from those newspapers, the statistics would give the impression that clear blue water was common phrase. But the statistics would be wrong …

Speaking of Writing and Writing of Speaking - The Fundamental Distinction

David Crystal
The distinction between speech and writing is traditionally felt to be fundamental to any discussion about language…

What's New about Word Frequency?

Philip Scholfield
Following the recent popularisation of the term 'lexical syllabus', one might be forgiven for thinking that the use of word frequency in ESL/EFL is totally new. Far from it…

Language Chunks

Paul Meara
Compared to many languages, English seems to have a rich and very large vocabulary. The reasons for this are well known…

Speaking of Writing and Writing of Speaking - Bridging the Gap

Katie Wales
It is often said that there is a gap between speech/speaking and writing, and indeed there is. We know that there are varieties of English that eve associate primarily with the spoken medium, and those primarily with the written…

Why Shouldn't Monolingual Dictionaries be as Easy to Use as Bilingual Ones?

Philip Scholfield
Surveys of learners' use of dictionaries generally confirm the teachers suspicion that, way beyond the elementary level, many still prefer trilingual dictionaries to monolingual ones…

21st Century English Vocabulary

Sue Engineer
English constantly renews itself by borrowing, coining, and combining words to fit new ideas and new developments, and that process has never been more apparent than now …

Getting The Balance Right

Paul Meara and Nick Ham
In 1975, a book of vocabulary tests called Test Your Own Word Power was published. The book was aimed at native speakers of English and claimed to be able to assess roughly how many words the reader knew…

Getting The Balance Right – Appendix: Diack's Test No. 19

Register Specification in the Learner's Dictionary

Yoshihiko Ikegami
One of the important features of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English which will be welcomed by Japanese teachers (as well as students) of English is its detailed specification of register…

Corpus Lexicography - Representativeness In Relation To Frequency

Della Summers
This article describes how the frequency of words in various corpora has influenced the presentation of phrases, the semantic description given in the definition, and the ordering of definitions in some entries in two Longman dictionaries ...

A Comparison of the Treatment of Collocations

Yuri Komuro
The dictionaries reviewed in this survey were. the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary; the Cambridge International Dictionary of English; the COBUILD English Dictionary; and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English

The Longman Spoken American Corpus: Providing an In-Depth Analysis of Everyday English

Karen Stern
Providing good coverage of American English in Longman's dictionaries from this side of the Atlantic might seem a difficult task. How does a Yankee over here keep from falling victim to the insidious transatlantic drift?