In keeping with COBUILD’s long-established, user-friendly tradition, this new edition will help you to understand not only the meanings of words, but also how to use them properly in context. The inclusion of a wealth of new words and meanings taken from areas such as social media, technology, and popular culture means that the Collins COBUILD Advanced American English Dictionary continues to reflect today’s English. The thousands of example sentences taken from the Collins Corpus ensure that language is shown in a meaningful context.

For this edition, we have updated and included hundreds of interesting and informative language features which will help you to acquire an even better understanding of how real English works. These features include detailed information about collocation, word history.

The corpus lies at the heart of each entry. Corpus research helps lexicographers to make confident and accurate decisions about the different senses of a word. It also informs the choice of words that are suitable for the dictionary (based on word frequency), the language used in the full-sentence definitions, the choice of examples, and the grammatical information given. Finally, it helps us to provide accurate information relating to the connotations of particular words – whether they express approval, disapproval, a particular emotion, or politeness, for example.

As well as checking and explaining the meanings of thousands of existing words, COBUILD’s lexicographers have continued to ensure that our 4.5-billion-word database - the Collins Corpus - is kept up to date. The corpus contains English language material from thousands of different written and spoken sources.

The corpus lies at the heart of each entry. Corpus research helps lexicographers to make confident and accurate decisions about the different senses of a word. It also informs the choice of words that are suitable for the dictionary (based on word frequency), the language used in the full-sentence definitions, the choice of examples, and the grammatical information given. Finally, it helps us to provide accurate information relating to the connotations of particular words – whether they express approval, disapproval, a particular emotion, or politeness, for example.

The new ‘Writing style guide’ and ‘Language in use’ sections (in the Appendix tab) help you to choose the right language for both written and spoken communication in a range of everyday situations. In addition, the ‘Grammar guide’ gives you the information you need to be able to write in a way which is appropriate for academic and business contexts.

We hope you will find this new edition of the Collins COBUILD Advanced American English Dictionary a valuable resource that complements and enhances all areas of language study.