Collins English Dictionary

The Collins English Dictionary is a printed and online dictionary of English. It is published by HarperCollins in Glasgow.

The first edition of the dictionary, in 1979, with Patrick Hanks as editor and Lawrence Urdang as editorial director, was the first British dictionary to use the full power of computer databases and typesetting in its preparation. This meant that, for instance, subject editors could control separate definitions of the same word and the results could be blended into the result, rather than one editor being responsible for a word.

By the third edition, they increasingly used the Bank of English established by Hanks at COBUILD to provide typical definitions rather than examples composed by the lexicographer.

Editions

The current edition is the 12th edition, which was published in October 2014. The previous edition was the 11th edition, which was published in October 2011. A special "30th Anniversary" 10th edition was published in 2010, with earlier editions published once every 3–4 years.

Dictionary

A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), with usage of information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, translation, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon. It is a lexicographical product designed for utility and function, curated with selected data, presented in a way that shows inter-relationship among the data.

A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries do not contain information about words that are used in language for general purposes—words used by ordinary people in everyday situations. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionaries are supposed to be semasiological, mapping word to definition, while specialized dictionaries are supposed to be onomasiological, first identifying concepts and then establishing the terms used to designate them. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types. There are other types of dictionaries that don't fit neatly in the above distinction, for instance bilingual (translation) dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms (thesauri), or rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary (unqualified) is usually understood to refer to a monolingual general-purpose dictionary.