Collins English Dictionary Complete and Unabridged Edition

The ''Collins English Dictionary'' is a printed and online

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

of English. It is published by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is a British–American publishing company that is considered to be one of the "Big Five (publishers), Big Five" English-language publishers, along with Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group USA, Hachette, Macmi ...

Glasgow Glasgow is the Cities of Scotland, most populous city in Scotland, located on the banks of the River Clyde in Strathclyde, west central Scotland. It is the List of cities in the United Kingdom, third-most-populous city in the United Kingdom ...

. It was first published in 1979.

Corpus

The dictionary uses language research based on the Collins Corpus, which is continually updated and has over 20 billion words.

Editions

* The current edition is the 14th; it was published on 31 August 2023, with more than 732,000 words, meanings, and phrases (not 730,000 headwords) and 9,500 place names and 7,300 biographies. A newer edition of the 14th edition was published 7 May 2024. * The previous edition was the 13th edition, which was published in November 2018. * A special "30th Anniversary" 10th edition was published in 2010. * Earlier editions were published once every 3 or 4 years.

History

The 1979 edition of the dictionary, with Patrick Hanks as editor and Laurence Urdang 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. The computer database used for the 1979 edition was donated to the ACL Data Collection Initiative. In a later edition, they increasingly used the Bank of English established by

John McHardy Sinclair John McHardy Sinclair (14 June 1933 – 13 March 2007) was a professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham University from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teachin ...

at COBUILD to provide typical citations rather than examples composed by the

lexicographer Lexicography is the study of lexicons and the art of compiling dictionaries. It is divided into two separate academic disciplines: * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionary, dictionaries. * The ...

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
''

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 project, and word images from

Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, 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 previously a co ...

. In August 2012, CollinsDictionary.com introduced crowd-sourcing for

neologism In linguistics, a neologism (; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered ...

s, 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 number o ...

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 word ...

. 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 Board game, game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, re ...

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 (: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar me ...

{{Dictionaries of English Online English dictionaries William Collins, Sons books 1979 non-fiction books