![Collins English Dictionary Complete and Unabridged Edition](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Collins_English_Dictionary_Complete_and_Unabridged_Edition.jpg)
The ''Collins English Dictionary'' is a printed and online
dictionary of English. It is published by
HarperCollins
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News ...
in
Glasgow
Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popul ...
.
The edition of the dictionary in 1979 with
Patrick Hanks
Patrick Hanks (born 24 March 1940) is an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He has edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of personal names.
Background
Hanks was educated at Ardingly College, ...
as editor and
Laurence Urdang
Laurence Urdang (March 21, 1927 – August 21, 2008) was a lexicographer, editor and author noted for first computerising the unabridged ''Random House Dictionary of the English Language'', published in 1966. He was also the founding editor ...
as editorial director, was the first British English dictionary to be typeset from the output from a computer database in a specified format. This meant that every aspect of an entry was handled by a different editor using different forms or templates. Once all the entries for an entry had been assembled, they were passed on to be keyed into the slowly assembled dictionary database which was completed for the typesetting of the first edition.
In a later edition, they increasingly used the Bank of English established by John Sinclair at
COBUILD
COBUILD, an acronym for Collins Birmingham University International Language Database, is a British research facility set up at the University of Birmingham in 1980 and funded by Collins publishers.
The facility was initially led by Professor Jo ...
to provide typical citations rather than examples composed by the
lexicographer
Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries.
* Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries.
* Theoretica ...
.
Editions
The current edition is the 13th edition, which was published in November 2018. The previous edition was the 12th edition, which was published in October 2014. A special "30th Anniversary" 10th edition was published in 2010, with earlier editions published once every 3–4 years.
CollinsDictionary.com
The unabridged ''Collins English Dictionary'' was published on the web on 31 December 2011 on CollinsDictionary.com, along with the unabridged dictionaries of French, German, Spanish and Italian.
[Collins launches free dictionary site](_blank)
'Wired UK
''Wired UK'' is a bimonthly magazine that reports on the effects of science and technology. It covers a broad range of topics including design, architecture, culture, the economy, politics and philosophy. Owned by Condé Nast Publications, it is ...
'', 3 January 2012. The site also includes example sentences showing word usage from the Collins Bank of English Corpus, word frequencies and trends from the Google
Ngrams
In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an ''n''-gram (sometimes also called Q-gram) is a contiguous sequence of ''n'' items from a given sample of text or speech. The items can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or b ...
project, and word images from
Flickr
Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...
.
In August 2012, CollinsDictionary.com introduced crowd-sourcing for neologisms,
whilst still maintaining overall editorial control to remain distinct from
Wiktionary
Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in all natural languages and in a numbe ...
and
Urban Dictionary
''Urban Dictionary'' is a crowdsourced English-language online dictionary for slang words and phrases. The website was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham. Originally, ''Urban Dictionary'' was intended as a dictionary of slang or cultural words ...
. This followed an earlier launch of a discussion forum for neologisms in 2004.
In May 2015, CollinsDictionary.com added 6,500 new
Scrabble
''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left t ...
words to their Collins Official Scrabble Wordlist. The words are based on terms related to and influenced by slang, social media, food, technology, and more.
References
External links
CollinsDictionary.com– ''Collins English Dictionary'', ''American English Dictionary'',
Thesaurus
A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea:
Synonym dictionar ...
.
{{Dictionaries of English
Online English dictionaries
William Collins, Sons books
1979 non-fiction books