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 addition of completely revised and updated language features will help you to acquire an even better understanding of how real English works. These features include detailed information about collocation, word history, and usage.

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 Intermediate Learner’s Dictionary continues to reflect today’s English. In addition, this new edition boasts thousands of new and updated example sentences to ensure that language is shown in a meaningful context.

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. Material is downloaded from websites, and daily feeds are received from newspapers.

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.

Using frequency information from the corpus, over 3,000 of the most frequent English words have been identified and are highlighted in pink in the dictionary. These are the words that you should aim to learn first; they will allow you to speak and write on a wide range of topics as you progress to a higher level.

New to this edition are a number of supplementary sections which will help you to use English accurately and appropriately. The ‘Writing style guide’ and ‘Language in use’ sections help you to choose the right language for both written and spoken communication in a range of everyday situations. In addition, the updated ‘Grammar guide’ gives you the information you need to be able to write in a way which is appropriate for different contexts.

We hope you will find this new edition of the Collins COBUILD Intermediate Learner’s Dictionary a valuable resource that complements and enhances all areas of language study